Absolutely worth a watch by @BrigidLaffan. Pretty thorough refutation of the Frost account of how we got to the Protocol in his introduction to the Policy Exchange paper (blaming Whitehall and the Benn-Burt Act).
https://twitter.com/rwynjones/status/1455573916974555141
Interesting to compare Brigid’s account to the far more sophisticated explanation of how we got to the Protocol in the Policy Exchange paper itself.
That paper recognises Ireland’s achievement - emphasised by Brigid - in getting its concerns about the border and its view of how critical the border was to the Good Friday Agreement established and accepted by the EU.
It also acknowledges the huge U.K. failings during the May government: failure to know what it wanted; failure to get up to speed; failure to understand that as a Member State Ireland would have huge weight with the EU.
The paper argues, however, that that approach downplayed the “East-West” GB-NI aspect of the GFA. (There’s a lot of detail - so that’s a heroic summary.)
However, it seems to me that the weaknesses of the paper are ultimately the same fundamental weaknesses as that of Frost’s approach.
1. Its failure to understand the political reality (powerfully argued by Brigid) that any checks/infrastructure at the border is simply unacceptable to the population that lives on either side of it (and without whose consent any form of border can’t work).
2. Its failure to acknowledge that - for the EU and for Ireland - the inevitable corollary of an open border is that NI has to be (effectively) in the EU customs territory and regulatory zone for goods.
That is the legal infrastructure that underpins open borders across the EU - and in its absence no other border anywhere in the world operates without checks and infrastructure.
Absent any coherent UK response to either point 1 or point 2 - and none emerged before the Protocol or has emerged since - the reality remains the Trilemma: and the consequence (given Johnson’s choice of hard Brexit for GB) is the Protocol.
(The first tweet should say “Parliament” rather than the Benn/Burt Act: Twitter really needs an edit function.)
(And to be clear - “far more sophisticated” above is a comparison to David Frost, not to Brigid Laffan.)
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