If we lose the Northern Ireland protocol, the rest of Brexit could quickly unravel

Editorial: Placing Northern Ireland simultaneously inside two customs and single market regimes was always going to be complicated – but there is no obvious alternative

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For those hoping that the end of the transition period would mean never hearing about Brexit again, the last few weeks will have been something of a disappointment. Concealed somewhat by Covid restrictions and the general global economic downturn, Brexit has already started to have some dramatic and malign effects across the UK. At the more trivial level there are the price hikes for French wines; more serious is the permanent and complete collapse of the Scottish shellfish industry, and the acute economic pain and political distress in Northern Ireland.

There are many who blame the Northern Ireland protocol for the current crisis in relations between the EU and the UK. There is something in that, because Brussels and London have both tried to weaponise it in recent weeks. Indeed even before it came properly into operation, the British government’s Internal Market Bill proposed to override the protocol at the unilateral and complete discretion of HM Government. This was the first breach of trust, and was in due course withdrawn.

Following that came the EU’s clumsy invocation of Article 16 of the protocol during the “vaccines war”. That too shook confidence in the new arrangements and destroyed trust among all concerned.