Boris Johnson’s Brexit chief to lay down ultimatum to Brussels over Northern Ireland

Rows over the Northern Irish border will be catapulted back to the top of the political agenda on Wednesday, having largely disappeared from the headlines since the EU’s agreement last month to be flexible in a set of disputes with London.

Wednesday is the day when Boris Johnson’s Brexit minister – and former chief negotiator – David Frost is due to unveil the UK government’s “new approach” to the Northern Ireland Protocol which the prime minister signed as part of his EU withdrawal deal.

Lord Frost is not expected to collapse ongoing talks with Brussels by declaring the protocol dead or invoking the notorious Article 16, which allows either side to suspend elements of the deal at the risk of triggering retaliatory tariffs from the other.

But he will set the scene for an explosive clash in the autumn, by pronouncing the protocol “unsustainable” as it is currently being implemented, and giving the EU until the end of September to resolve problems or face escalatory action.

It is thought that the Tory peer will set out a plan which would sweep away a large number of checks on goods travelling from the British mainland to Northern Ireland.

Under the scheme, supermarkets might be given responsibility over goods destined for their own branches in the province, and border checks at Northern Irish ports would be restricted only to those goods clearly heading for the Republic of Ireland.

He will continue to snub an EU offer of a Swiss-style veterinary agreement which Brussels believes would remove the need for 80 per cent of checks by ensuring that both sides stick to the same hygiene and safety standards. But equally, the 27-nation bloc is unlikely to budge on London’s alternative offer of an “equivalence” agreement under which the two sides would accept that their standards were broadly similar and waive the requirement for inspections at the border.

A full-scale conflagration was averted in June when the EU agreed to delay until 30 September the implementation of an agreement reached with Mr Johnson as part of the protocol, which would have banned movements of chilled meats such as sausages from the mainland into Northern Ireland.

But the bust-up was only postponed, not avoided, with Brussels viewing the extended “grace period” – along with others implemented unilaterally by the UK on parcels and supermarket supplies – as an opportunity for retailers and supply chains to prepare for the new arrangements.

Patience at the European Commission is wearing thin after the UK failed to make the necessary arrangements, or to recruit, train and equip the necessary border officials and vets, in the 20 months following the conclusion of the protocol in October 2019. The UK has yet even to provide its inspectors with access to IT systems, which was due to happen on 1 January, the EU complains.

At the root of the row is Mr Johnson’s decision to accept a customs border in the Irish Sea, as a means of getting rid of Theresa May’s “backstop”, which was deeply unpopular with hardline Brexiteers because it would have kept the UK in the EU single market and customs union indefinitely.

Brussels agreed a unique arrangement in which Northern Ireland alone remains within the single market and responsibility for overseeing what was now effectively the EU’s external customs border was handed over to the officials of a third country operating outside EU territory.

While the deal allowed Johnson to “get Brexit done” it has inevitably created massive disruption to movements of goods as tens of thousands of new documentary, identity and physical checks are carried out on shipments arriving in Northern Ireland from Britain. And the existence of separate rules for Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK has enraged Unionists, who fear it puts the province on the route towards reunification with the south.

Lord Frost has put himself in the peculiar position of loudly declaring – in newspaper columns and appearances before think tanks, parliamentary committees and the Stormont assembly – that the deal he negotiated and Mr Johnson signed is a disaster. It has led to empty shelves in shops, pointless bureaucracy, a “chilling effect” on British exporters thinking of selling in Northern Ireland and a diversion of supply chains to the republic, he tells anyone who will listen.

Both he and Johnson insist the problems are not an inevitable consequence of the PM’s decision to opt for the hardest of hard Brexits, but result from “overzealous” application of the rules by Brussels, which they somehow failed to anticipate.

The choreographed displays of exasperation seem designed to lay the foundations for the UK later to claim the protocol has created the kinds of persistent “serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties” which would permit the invocation of Article 16. They set the scene for a protracted game of “chicken” as each side weighs up whether the other is ready to take the blame for collapsing the protocol, with the risk that would pose to the peace process and the Good Friday Agreement.

Meanwhile, nationalists in Northern Ireland are pressing the government to implement the protocol in full, seeing its promise to deepen ties with the south and provide lucrative access to EU markets. And businesses are left tearing their hair out and pleading for a return to normality.

The protocol will undoubtedly survive Wednesday. But Lord Frost’s statement to the House of Lords will be an important staging point towards what appears to be Mr Johnson’s ultimate goal of ensuring that the deal he signed is never implemented in the form he agreed.

The article was amended on 19 August 2021 to remove two inaccurate references to ‘Ulster’ and replace them with ‘Northern Ireland’.