Here we go again: a no-deal Brexit is back on the table

We are not going to trigger Article 16 today, said David Frost on Friday. Lord Frost is a cabinet minister and chief negotiator of Task Force Europe, to give him his official title. He negotiated Boris Johnson’s withdrawal agreement in 2019 and the UK-EU trade agreement in 2020, two long sets of talks conducted in the shadow of British threats to walk away in a no-deal exit.

The first time, Johnson and Frost said they were prepared to leave the EU without an agreement, which would have meant immediate tariff barriers to trade between the UK and the EU. That was averted when parliament voted for the withdrawal agreement after the election.

Then a no-deal scenario loomed again, as the post-Brexit transition period was due to expire at the end of last year. If the two sides had failed to agree the trade treaty, those tariff barriers would have gone up after all on 1 January. That, too, was averted, with a day to spare, when parliament voted for the Trade and Cooperation Agreement on 30 December last year.

Could we really be back in the same position a third time? We could. Most people may not be paying much attention, but Johnson and Frost insist that they are prepared to invoke Article 16 of the Northern Ireland protocol, part of the withdrawal agreement, which means unilaterally suspending the protocol in an emergency.

They didn’t do it on Friday, but say that they will if the EU side fails to shift its position on renegotiating the protocol. If they do, we would then be likely to be in what journalists call a “trade war”. Mujtaba Rahman, of the LSE European Institute, explains what this means. He expects an “immediate” EU Council decision to suspend the UK-EU trade deal, but this cannot come into effect for a year, which means that we would be facing another no-deal Brexit moment at the end of 2022.

In other words, this would set up the EU and the UK for another year of negotiations under the shadow of a no-deal exit: Brexit, round three.

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Personally, I find it hard to believe that a no-deal exit will ever happen, just as it wasn’t likely either of the first two times. Indeed, the first time it was blocked by legislation passed against the government by a majority in parliament.

This time, I think Johnson and Frost have so far failed to make a convincing case for rewriting the protocol. The demand to take out all references to the European Court seems to be a sop to the Democratic Unionist Party, which is heading for a thrashing at the Northern Ireland assembly elections next year anyway.

Otherwise, the issue dividing the two sides in the talks is simply whether the minimal checks on goods going to Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK are minimal enough – while most parties in Northern Ireland, and a majority of the public there, are in favour of the protocol as it is.

But there could still be an awful lot of brinkpersonship between now and a – third – pragmatic compromise.

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator