After four long years, Brexit’s collision with reality was always going to hurt. The government’s lies about Northern Irish trade were going to be exposed; the Brexit hardliners were going to feel betrayed. But what few people reckoned upon was the UK’s answer to that. This week the government decided that it would not shy from reality, but cancel it altogether. Faced with the impending consequences of its actions, it has chosen instead to violate international law.
We needn’t dwell too much on the technicalities. The Internal Market Bill breaches key elements of the Northern Ireland Protocol, which comprised the most significant and contentious element of the Withdrawal Treaty. The EU knows we are breaking the law. So do the government’s lawyers. So do UK ministers. In what may become one of the most notorious comments ever uttered by a minister in the Commons, Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis described the law-breaking as “specific and limited.” No amount of illegality was tolerable for the head of the Government Legal Department, who resigned on Tuesday. It should not be tolerable for anyone else either.
If we cannot credit the government with good faith or adherence to the law, we can with imagination. In the last few days it has invented countless creative excuses. The deal was signed in a rush. The consequences were unforeseen. It is a bad deal which threatens British sovereignty and the union.
These excuses range from spurious to outrageous. Yes, the deal was signed in a rush. That was the direct fault of a government which allotted less parliamentary time for the agreement than for the Wild Animals in Circuses Act, then forced all Conservative election candidates to endorse it. They could have given MPs several weeks to scrutinise the most important legislation in a generation, but instead scoffed that parliament had already had three years. This was a rush, alright: one insisted upon by the prime minister.
The government is of course right on another point. This is indeed a bad deal. But its consequences were not unforeseen. Commentators warned about them tirelessly. When the exit negotiations began, it quickly became clear that Brexit would hinge around borders. Because an invisible frontier had to be preserved on the island of Ireland, either the whole UK would have to stay in the single market and customs union or Northern Ireland alone would—and that would necessitate a border in the Irish Sea. This unavoidable truth was made explicit as far back as the UK/EU joint report of December 2017. Of course it required rule-taking. Of course it required a division within the UK. Commentators highlighted it for years, and each time were accused of lying or fearmongering.
Now, extraordinarily, Boris Johnson has claimed that a measure designed to save the Good Friday Agreement must be discarded to preserve peace. That is a direct inversion of the truth. The Northern Irish Protocol was never a Brussels ploy to punish Britain, break the union or institute new customs requirements: from beginning to end, it was a mechanism to avoid bloodshed, and delicately balanced the needs of both communities. The stark and inescapable conclusion is that the UK government will only look after one community’s interests and completely override the other’s, even at the expense of binding international commitments. This is not simply a tragedy about two countries, whose hard-won friendship, cooperation and trust after centuries of hostility has unravelled in just four years. A unilateral decision to amend the protocol’s key provisions, and compromise the open land border, risks genuine destabilisation.
But of course this goes even further than Ireland. The government’s plans jeopardise every international relationship it currently depends on. If Britain’s word means nothing now, it will mean nothing ever. In language normally reserved for dictatorships and rogue states, the European Commission’s statement on Thursday condemned an “extremely serious violation of international law,” and it is exploring legal options. And yet this is not just about the EU, devastating though a no-deal rupture would be. This is about the UK’s standing in the world for the next generation and beyond. We can no longer depend on friendly agreements and no longer hold others to account. A country that was already a joke stands to become a pariah.
The final aggrieved party is the one discussed the least: the British electorate. This deal formed the key plank of the Conservative Party’s election platform last December and won them an 80-seat majority. You might, indeed, term it the “will of the people.” Certainly, it was the means to “get Brexit done” and sold as “oven-ready.” The bakers knew it was toxically inedible but served it up to voters anyway. Now they will break the law rather than admit the truth.
Nobody forced this deal upon the Brexiters: not Theresa May, not Remainers, and not Brussels. Johnson’s government negotiated it, praised it, signed it and now owns it. The intrusion of reality, and desperate need to conceal it, is the story of Brexit. But the government’s newest and deepest breach of trust betrays something even more damaging. It is not just that the government has been lying to people with impunity for the last year, and for the three years before that. It is not even that people are being newly criminalised for gathering in parks at the same moment the government breaks any law it chooses. This is now a rogue government. It has lost its legitimacy. It no longer acknowledges limits or restraint. It will do whatever it likes, to whomever it likes, and believes nothing can stop it.