New tussle with the EU over Northern Ireland: BoJo’s great challenge is to keep the Kingdom intact
The overwhelming return to the limelight of the Northern Irish Protocol – purely by chance at the same time as the controversy over AstraZeneca – has revived a newly assertive Boris Johnson, ready to do anything to defend the territorial integrity of the United Kingdom. In discussions with the leaders of the European Union in Carbis Bay – the magnificent seat of the G7 – Johnson even went so far as to hypothesize the use of Article 16 of the Protocol, which allows the unilateral termination by one of the contractors. The unfortunate exit of French President Macron ("Ulster is not part of the United Kingdom") has certainly not favored a more conciliatory attitude on the part of the Tory leader.
Why did it come to this point six months after Brexit ? Brussels accuses the Tory government of playing dirty and not carrying out checks due to goods in the Irish Sea as required by the agreement, which provides that in some sectors Belfast continues to be regulated by Union rules. In truth, it was the European Commission itself that blatantly violated the Protocol, when last winter it announced the blocking of vaccine doses destined for Ulster without even notifying Johnson and his Dublin peer, Martin. An even more serious fact if we take into account that Eire is a fully-fledged member of the EU and that it has even led the Sinn Fein separatists to sympathize with London.
Johnson knows that his most arduous task in recent years will be to maintain the territorial integrity of the United Kingdom, threatened by Scottish secessionism and by the decades-long push towards a united Ireland. One way not to go down in history as the premier who saw Edinburgh and Belfast greet London is to tie the economies of the home nations even more to the English one and to make the internal market as uniform as possible, put under pressure by the agreement. for the Brexit of December 2020. Already the Internal Market Bill, presented at the end of summer 2020 to the Municipalities, had caused the piqued reaction of Brussels, which had threatened to take legal action – typical Brussels posture – against London for the failure compliance with an international agreement. Things soon smoothed out with a transitional agreement obtained in the new UK-EU Joint Commission, which saw Commission vice president Sefcovic and British government delegate Michael Gove among its protagonists. Now, perhaps to protect him from a thorny issue, Gove no longer deals with Brussels, and his place has ended up in the hands of Lord Frost, former UK chief negotiator for the Brexit deal.
The problem of the control of goods on the border between the United Kingdom and Ulster also affects Washington, of course. All parties were quick to argue that any solution must not endanger the peace in Northern Ireland, carried out by the Good Friday Accords of 1998 under the supervision of the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton and his envoy for the 'Ulster, Senator Mitchell. Biden, who knows the matter well, raised it in bilateral with Johnson upon his arrival in Cornwall and his national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, also said he was concerned.
If Johnson said he was in favor of a "practical" solution to the question, which risks jeopardizing the passage of refrigerated meat from the UK to Ulster, and that the tabloids – reminiscent of an episode of the TV series Yes, Minister – have called the "sausage war" by the Commission seems to prevail a punitive approach, which Johnson himself defined as "purist".
If in the sitcom the Minister used the war in Brussels against the English sausage for his rise to the role of prime minister, it is safe to bet that a political animal like Johnson will not miss the opportunity to become the champion of all the British against. the harassment – real or alleged – implemented by the European Commission.
The post New tussle with the EU over Northern Ireland: BoJo's big challenge is to keep the Kingdom intact appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/la-grande-sfida-di-johnson-tenere-integro-il-regno-unito/ on Mon, 14 Jun 2021 04:00:00 +0000.