Peter Ramsay on how Sunak’s deal with the DUP neutralises Brexit and confirms what we have previously argued on The Northern Star: that Britain’s national sovereignty needs Ireland’s reunification.
Jeffrey Donaldson’s announcement that the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) will end its two-year boycott of the devolved power-sharing executive that governs Northern Ireland is bad news for Britain. The DUP has been protesting against the Northern Ireland Protocol under which Northern Ireland remained in the EU’s Single Market after Brexit, with the result that a trade border was established between it and the rest of the UK. Rishi Sunak’s government has now offered the DUP a deal that they have decided to take. It is a deal that confirms that the Union with Northern Ireland is a fetter on Britain’s national sovereignty.
The details of the agreement had already been leaked. One of its key elements is that the UK government promises to ensure that future UK legislation will be screened to prevent the creation of any new barriers to trade between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. In other words, to get devolved local government in Northern Ireland working again, the British government has agreed that rules governing the whole of the UK economy will not diverge significantly from EU Single Market regulations. What that will do is keep the UK tied to the sclerotic Single Market and its increasingly unstable and fragmenting political union. The Tory Brexiteers’ will certainly never reach their fantasy paradise of a deregulated UK, but few British voters are interested in that in any case. More important, the deal neutralises any potential that Brexit might have had to change Britain’s political economy in the direction of greater investment, a change which many voters desperately need. It leaves the regulation of Britain’s economy effectively in the hands of a union of foreign governments over which the British people have no influence at all.
As the editors of The Northern Star predicted in our book Taking Control, the Northern Ireland Protocol would be ‘a means to neutralise Brexit’ (p162). Boris Johnson agreed to it in 2019 in order to ‘Get Brexit done’, and then he talked about getting rid of it but did not do so. Conservative Eurosceptics may now shout betrayal, but what they cannot admit is that they never had any other solution.
The reason for the Protocol is that the Irish government will not agree to a trade border between Brexit Britain and the Single Market along the land border between the UK and the Republic. Dublin already had huge influence on the way Northern Ireland is governed long before Brexit. This is because the constitutional settlement in the province is based on the 1998 Belfast Agreement (aka the Good Friday Agreement), a political deal in which the UK agreed to cooperate with Dublin over a wide range of questions concerning Ireland on both sides of the border. To get rid of the trade border put in the Irish Sea by the Protocol therefore requires either a complete reversal of Dublin’s position (and there is no sign of that) or a willingness in Britain to find an entirely new way to govern the province. But nobody has suggested what that new form of government might be. Ever since 1972, British governments have had no other idea of how to stabilise the divided province than to rely on Dublin to prop them up. From the failed Sunningdale agreement in 1974 through Margaret Thatcher’s Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985 to the 1998 Belfast Agreement, British governments have recognised the limitations of their authority in the North by bringing Dublin in.
The upshot today is either continued political paralysis within Northern Ireland or the whole UK being ruled by Single Market regulations over which the UK has no say. The tail of Northern Ireland’s local government is wagging the dog of the British nation’s sovereignty.
Northern Ireland reveals that the Tory and populist Eurosceptics never understood what national sovereignty means. The real way in which EU membership subverted sovereignty was that it undermined the political relationship of the British state with its own people. (A problem besetting most EU member-states today, including the Republic of Ireland.) But not understanding this, the Brexiteers neither foresaw nor understood the problems they would be caused by a territory in which the British state has so little authority that it requires the involvement of another state to help it rule there
For the British people there is one possible upside to the DUP decision. The DUP is going back to Stormont now following Sinn Fein’s victory in the last elections in the North. The Unionists will therefore have to serve in a government with a ‘nationalist’ First Minister for the first time. That they have agreed to do this indicates the extent to which Unionism is on the back foot. The decision will likely cause further splits in Unionism. This means that the path remains open to the only serious alternative to the current constitutional settlement: ending the Union with Great Britain and reunifying Ireland. But this backward method of getting there via the Protocol will only tend to make the process slow, convoluted and technocratic.
For anyone seriously interested in the future of Britain’s national sovereignty, the reunification of Ireland is an urgent necessity. And if that is to happen then real movement is needed on the constitutional question in Britain too. It is time to cut the Gordian knot of Northern Ireland’s endless sectarian wrangling and remove the excuse it provides to Whitehall for neutralising Brexit. If there is no political movement in Britain for an end to the Union with Northern Ireland, then Sunak’s deal with Donaldson may come to be remembered as another Tory nail driven into the coffin of Britain’s national sovereignty.
The Northern Star 
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