Thread by @KellerZoe

The EU see the NI Protocol as a way to keep the UK close to their regulatory orbit and won't become more reasonable. We have no choice but to abolish it and very little to lose — writes Daniel Hannan. telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/06/1…

People in NI call on the EU to show “pragmatism” or “flexibility” in interpreting the Protocol are spectacularly missing the point. Brussels has no interest in being reasonable. The protocol is the surest way to keep the UK from straying too far from its regulatory orbit.

Already, every trade deal we contract with a third country needs to be compatible with its terms. But they want to go further until we agree to follow all EU food and veterinary rules in perpetuity, thereby rendering an independent commercial policy far less viable.

No British administration could accept such an outcome. Indeed, no self-respecting country should tolerate a situation in which internal trade barriers are maintained on its own soil by an overseas power, and a chunk of its population is partially subject to foreign rule.

The Protocol cannot be maintained. The question is whether the EU will acquiesce to its substantive reform. All the signs are that it won’t. As Emmanuel Macron put it on Thursday: “Nothing is negotiable. Everything is applicable.”

Never mind that the NIP has destabilised the delicate balance in Ulster bringing mass protests to the streets. Never mind that, according to the surviving author of the Good Friday Agreement, David Trimble, it is incompatible with that accord.

The EU's proclaimed interest in the peace process was exposed as hogwash when it attempted to impose a border on the island of Ireland from resentment at the success of Britain’s vaccination programme. The EU has no concern for Ireland. The NIP is about pressure on Boris Johnson.

Don’t fall for the spin the NIP being a largely symbolic issue, of interest only to Unionists, and with only slight real-world consequences. The Protocol is causing needless economic disruption.

I sit on the parliamentary committee studying its effects: we have been taking evidence from all sides. No one we heard was an enthusiast for the NIP. Some accepted it as a price worth paying, some wanted it scrapped, almost everyone wanted it at least changed if not replaced.

One economist told us that, extrapolating from the additional paperwork now associated with moving each pallet of goods, the cost of the Protocol was around 6% of the roughly £10 billion worth of material moved annually from Great Britain into Northern Ireland.

That figure, very significant for local businesses, is negligible for the EU’s economy. Trade between the two parts of the UK is equivalent to 0.0008% of the EU’s GDP. Yet Brussels conducts around 20% of all the checks on goods entering its territory on this nugatory volume.

No one seriously thinks that this is about “protecting the integrity of the single market”. The EU is not deploying the full panoply of checks because it thinks that a pork pie sold in the Sainsbury’s in Armagh might somehow cross the border.

Even some of our Europhile civil servants have had their eyes opened. It is clear that the EU is, once again, insisting on the most maximalist and unreasonable position imaginable, even when such a position hurts its own interests.

All of which, paradoxically, makes Britain’s choice much easier. There are two sets of problems with the Protocol. The first kind are practical. The second are democratic and cannot be tackled other than through a clean abrogation.

Had the EU been a bit more sensible Britain would have found an outright repudiation of the Protocol much tougher. But the EU’s intransigence makes abrogation both desirable and inevitable.

Under the terms of the Protocol (art. 6), Brussels was supposed to use its “best endeavours to facilitate the trade between Northern Ireland and other parts of the United Kingdom”. No one seriously claims that it has done so.

When Britain declares that, in the light of the EU’s attitude, the Protocol no longer applies, Brussels will have to apply some sort of sanction. Frankly, though, it is hard to see what it can do that it is not doing already.

It arbitrarily refuses to grant equivalence to UK financial services firms. It pettily vetoes Britain’s accession to the Lugano Convention on mutual legal enforcement (as its name suggests, the Lugano Convention is a pan-European deal, not an EU one).

It might apply actual tariffs – but every economist understands, even if not every politician does, that tariffs end up doing the greatest harm to the state that applies them.

There is nothing the EU can do that is worse, from Britain, than maintaining the Protocol. And we might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb. We won’t get a better opportunity to tackle the really objectionable part of the deal, namely the democratic deficit.

What would happen if the whole Protocol were simply scrapped? A physical border in Ireland? Of course not. No UK or Irish government was ever going to put up border checks. That was a scare story aimed at chiefly American opinion.

Britain should offer what was always the obvious alternative: a system of mutual enforcement whereby each party undertakes in law to prevent illicit goods from entering the territory of the other. Not that Britain will be especially fussed about reciprocity.

We are pretty relaxed about EU goods entering our territory. But a system of mutual enforcement, based on proportionate risk assessment and electronic pre-screening, was the obvious solution all along (was the one explored by London and Dublin before Leo Varadkar took over).

Britain would, in effect, say the following. “We tried to make the Protocol work, but it became clear that the EU saw it as a negotiating lever rather than as a practical mechanism. We are therefore abolishing it and restoring full democracy to Northern Ireland.

We repeat our pledge not to raise any new physical infrastructure at the Irish border. We are open to any realistic scheme that will allow the EU to make the same pledge. We suggest a system of mutual recognition and mutual enforcement.”