U.K. Prime Minister Faces More Tortured Brexit Talks After Ireland Cries Foul
November 22 2017 - 6:12PM
Dow Jones News
By Simon Nixon
Just when Theresa May thought she was finally making progress in
the Brexit negotiations, she finds herself facing the gravest
crisis since she triggered Article 50.
For months, the U.K. prime minister has been grappling with how
to choreograph a climbdown over the so-called Brexit bill. She has
to navigate the diplomatic failure of her Florence speech, which
failed to deliver the expected breakthrough when the other 27 EU
member states rejected her financial offer as too vague to warrant
the start of trade talks.
Since then, U.K. officials have been working on an elaborately
stage-managed sequence of events designed to break the logjam at
the EU summit in December. The goal is a deal where the U.K. would
agree to honor its share of the EU's existing financial obligations
in return for the EU's vow to start trade talks and commit to a
two-year transition deal.
This choreography already was fiendishly complicated. But the
Irish government now threatens to derail the whole process with its
declaration that insufficient progress has been made on finding
ways to avoid a hard border with Northern Ireland -- one of the
three priorities for the first phase.
Dublin, with full EU backing, is insisting that the U.K. needs
to commit to avoiding any future regulatory divergence between
Northern Ireland the EU, so goods can continue to move freely
across the Ireland-Northern Ireland border.
The U.K. government is adamant that it cannot possibly give such
a guarantee since this would effectively undermine the economic and
constitutional integrity of the U.K. itself. As things stand, it is
hard to see how these positions can be reconciled. Yet without
agreement on this issue in the next 10 days, the choreography won't
work: the negotiations can't move to the second stage, regardless
of what money Mrs. May puts on the table.
Dublin's hard-line stance appears to have caught London
completely unaware. But it is hard to see why it should have.
The Irish position has always been clear. The rejection of a
hard border in Ireland was in the EU's negotiating guidelines.
Dublin has consistently stated that it won't accept technological
solutions to the border problem such as those contained in a U.K.
white paper published this summer. And EU's view that negotiations
over the border had not made sufficient progress were clearly
stated in the conclusions of the European Council's October summit
and repeated by Irish and EU officials since.
Meanwhile the U.K. has been engaged with the EU's Brexit task
force in an extensive mapping exercise since July which has so far
identified over 140 different areas in which Brexit threatens the
Good Friday Agreement. The U.K. could hardly expect to conclude
this process with Ireland without identifying solutions, says a
senior EU official.
The British misjudgment was to assume that Dublin would never
stick to its guns -- whether because the other 26 EU countries
would refuse to allow it to hold up the process or because Ireland
itself has as much to lose from a disorderly Brexit.
Certainly British officials believe Dublin has made a serious
mistake by asking for something that is utterly impossible for any
British government to accept. They argue that the Conservative
party would be just as opposed to any deal that committed Northern
Ireland to no regulatory divergence with the EU as its allies in
the Democratic Unionist Party.
The U.K. government continues to insist that it is impossible to
find a solution to the Northern Irish border until you know the
shape of the problem, which won't be known until there is clarity
about the future economic relationship between the U.K. and EU. By
adopting such a granular approach, the U.K. thinks it will be
possible to iron away most of the border problems.
Yet the U.K. government underestimates the extent to which this
is an existential issue for Ireland: it is less than 100 years
since the Republic of Ireland fought a bitter civil war following
the partition of the island. No Irish Prime Minister wants to go
down in history for signing a second treaty leading to the
re-imposition of a hard border.
Besides, Irish and EU officials reject the idea that carving out
a special status for Northern Ireland would undermine the U.K.
constitution: they note that the U.K. already accepts regulatory
divergence from U.K. standards in Northern Ireland, such as the
arrangements underpinning the all-island electricity market. It
also argues that there are many examples of separate regulatory
arrangements within sovereign states. The U.K. was instrumental in
establishing exactly such an arrangement in Hong Kong in 1984.
Can this deadlock be broken? That's not clear.
But the pressure is clearly on Mrs. May. She needs to make
sufficient progress in December, both to shore up her political
position and to avoid an exodus of business as companies activate
their contingency plans in the New Year.
But to make progress, Mrs. May will need to acknowledge that her
current policy on Northern Ireland is based on three incompatible
red lines: no membership of the EU customs union or single market;
no hard border in Ireland; and no border in the Irish Sea. Dublin
and Brussels are determined to that the UK government should spell
out how these red lines will be redrawn; the fate of Brexit may
hinge on the outcome of this harsh confrontation with reality.
Write to Simon Nixon at simon.nixon@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 22, 2017 17:57 ET (22:57 GMT)
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