Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s former chief negotiator on Brexit has blamed the political “weakness” of Britain’s position in relation to the European Union for the problems with the Northern Ireland Protocol.
Under the protocol Northern Ireland effectively joins the EU’s Single Market but a de facto border in the Irish Sea requires customs checks on goods moving from the British mainland to Ulster, something which has infuriated unionists and loyalists.
Frost wrote: “A persistent concept to have bedevilled the negotiations between this country and the EU over Northern Ireland has been that of the ‘all-island economy’. This is the belief that the economies of Ireland and Northern Ireland, in many significant areas, are so closely integrated as to form one economic unit.”
Policy Exchange’s Chief Economic Adviser Graham Gudgin, who wrote the report, said there had been little economic integration between Northern Ireland and the Republic since the 1998 agreement which brought The Troubles to an end.
Gudgin said only 4 percent of the goods and services produced in Northern Ireland cross the border to the Republic, compared to 16 percent which go to the British mainland, and only 6 percent of Ulster’s imports come from the Republic.
Frost goes on to say: “Why, then, did the concept of the ‘all-island economy’ get so established? And why does it matter? The answer is that it suited the political needs of the EU and Ireland.”
He said the Northern Ireland Protocol had been “shaped” by the “relative UK weakness and EU predominance.”
Lord Trimble, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), wrote in a separate foreword to the report: “As we approach the 25th anniversary of the GFA it is clear that its institutions are in crisis and indeed on life support.”
He goes on to say: “The government says that its policy is designed to create the conditions for the re-establishment of the functioning of the GFA. It is involved in a test of wills with the EU which it cannot flunk.”
