The Conservatives are still getting Northern Ireland wrong

During the Conservatives’ time in government, the party’s opponents and hostile Irish commentators often claimed that the Tories treated the Republic of Ireland badly. Last week, Keir Starmer repeated this received wisdom at the British-Irish summit in Liverpool. The two countries, he said, had finally “turned a page on those turbulent years,” thanks to Labour coming to power. 

While the prime minister courted the Taoiseach, Micheal Martin, and offered to “reset” this one-sided relationship, his Tory counterpart was defending the Windsor Framework in an answer to a question from an Ulster journalist. It was a reminder that the Conservatives were actually so determined to placate the Irish during Brexit that they cut Northern Ireland off politically and economically from the rest of the UK. And they’re still not ready to admit they were wrong.

Kemi Badenoch made her comments to the unionist daily newspaper, the News Letter, in the wake of the Northern Ireland Conservatives’ conference in Belfast. The framework, she claimed, was “a very difficult settlement,” but it represented “an improvement on what we had before.” This echoed equally baseless language from Labour’s secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Hilary Benn, who recently described the settlement as “a big step forward,” in the House of Commons.

This cosy consensus could scarcely be more wrong. The original protocol was onerous and unworkable, but it remained largely unimplemented, thanks to “grace periods” on things like food, parcels and veterinary medicines. By contrast, the framework was intended specifically to put these problematic aspects of the Irish sea border in place and make them permanent.

The outcome is that, since Rishi Sunak negotiated his deal with the EU, and agreed the meaningless Safeguarding the Union document with the DUP, the barriers between Great Britain and Ulster have become progressively harder. Just before Christmas, the EU’s new product safety regulations persuaded many British companies to stop selling to Northern Ireland altogether. An onerous ‘parcels border’ is about to further decimate online sales to the province, when it is implemented at the end of this month. Mainland companies have claimed that they now face less bureaucracy when they send goods to Japan.

Meanwhile, the Tories’ assertion that the framework applied only to trade in goods has disintegrated. The courts struck down the last government’s Rwanda Act and parts of the Legacy Act in Northern Ireland, because they were deemed incompatible with EU laws. The House of Commons no longer has the power, in significant policy areas, to legislate for an integral part of its national territory. Yet the Conservatives share with Labour a determination not to acknowledge the scale of what has been done to Northern Ireland.

Badenoch claimed in the News Letter that the framework was an improvement on “what we had before”. The problem with that argument, even if it was true, is that “what we had before” was also the responsibility of Conservative prime ministers. Boris Johnson signed the protocol, and it was Theresa May who first agreed to treat Ulster differently to the rest of the UK, as Brexit progressed.

Kemi Badenoch had a genuine chance to apologise for the Tories’ broken promises on Northern Ireland

Her commitment that there would be no border between Northern Ireland and the Republic was based on the idea that checks or paperwork at the frontier would breach some unwritten annex of the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement. It echoed the claims of Irish nationalists so closely that the historian Lord Bew expressed astonishment at  the way the “British government has allowed the Irish government to control the narrative (around the agreement) … unchallenged.” The accord’s hidden content also conformed spookily with the former prime minister’s preference for a “backstop” that would keep the whole United Kingdom aligned closely with the EU’s customs union and single market. 

Rather than set out her preference for a close relationship with Brussels openly, May used Northern Ireland as an excuse for a deal that her opponents dubbed “Brexit in Name Only” or BRINO. Her lead negotiator, Olly Robbins, famously let slip that the “backstop” was conceived as a “bridge” to a new long-term trading link between Britain and the EU. 

This tactic was based, ultimately on accepting false claims by the Irish that the Belfast Agreement disallowed a “hard border” between Northern Ireland and the Republic. This was an irresponsible strategy and one that led directly to the province’s problems today. The Conservatives under May capitulated to Dublin, because she thought it would prevent the kind of “hard Brexit” she feared. Under Boris Johnson, they capitulated to secure the kind of deal that he favoured, and avoid a row with the Irish.

Kemi Badenoch had a genuine chance to apologise for the Tories’ broken promises on Northern Ireland. She could have admitted that the framework made things worse for the province and Sunak’s Safeguarding the Union deal with the DUP made almost no difference at all. Instead, she’s doubled down on the transparent falsehood that the Conservatives at least sorted out their own self-inflicted mess.