The Critic, June 28
Over the past week, political pundits have again debated at length the merits of Brexit, as well as its problems, to mark the seventh anniversary of the referendum result. Unfortunately, the discussion rarely touched upon the status of Northern Ireland, which was effectively left behind in the European Union so that the rest of Britain could make its departure.
The government now claims that the seemingly endless negotiations with Brussels about the province are over. According to Rishi Sunak, his Windsor Framework agreement made the Northern Ireland Protocol workable, by removing “any sense” of a border in the Irish Sea.
In the minds of Ulster’s unionists, the deal fell far short of restoring their place in the UK’s internal market or providing free flowing trade between mainland Britain and Northern Ireland. That’s why the Centre for Brexit Policy think tank published a new document at Westminster today, endorsed by the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and the European Research Group (ERG) of Tory MPs, aimed at replacing the protocol with a form of “mutual enforcement”. Under this arrangement, the UK and the EU would police each other’s regulations, and exporters who broke the rules would be prosecuted, which was a solution previously championed by the late Lord Trimble.
In the document’s foreword, the DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson wrote that the proposals could potentially create a “sound and stable foundation” for the restoration of Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government. Since February 2022, his party has boycotted the institutions at Stormont in protest at the protocol, which kept the province de facto in the EU’s single market for goods, whilst the rest of the UK left.
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