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Fintan O’Toole: Ireland should go along with fiction that UK's Brexit damage limitation is victory

Don’t gloat at Britain, the once-powerful free country that has made itself weak

UK prime minister Boris Johnson attendiing the House of Commons. Photograph: Jessica Taylor/AFP via Getty Images

Fintan O'Toole's face
Fintan O'Toole
Sat Dec 19 2020 - 06:00

For some terrible sin in a previous life, I was condemned, in this one, to be a follower of the English football club, Nottingham Forest. The well of misery is bottomless, but perhaps the worst moment was an 8-1 home defeat by Manchester United in February 1999.

In his post-match interview, our hapless manager, Big Ron Atkinson, a football equivalent of Boris Johnson, said: "We said beforehand that we'd be bright and attractive, and there you are: a nine-goal thriller."

The Brexit game has been, from a British point of view, just such a nine-goal thriller. One side has been getting hammered over and over again. Yet it may be in everybody’s interests to allow Big Boris to claim a moral victory. And, after all, it sure has been a thriller.

It seems so long ago now that it is hard to remember that Britain was already one-nil down when the talks between its then Brexit supremo David Davis and the EU's chief negotiator Michel Barnier began on June 19th, 2017.

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Theresa May’s government absolutely insisted that the only reasonable way to conduct the negotiations was to start with the trade deal that would define future relations and then work in parallel on the terms of Britain’s withdrawal.

This, Davis said, was going to be "the row of the summer" of 2017. He told ITV's Robert Peston in May: "How on earth do you resolve the issue of the border with Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland unless you know what our general borders policy is, what the customs agreement is, what our trade agreement is? It's wholly illogical."

What happened? There was no row. Britain just capitulated to the EU’s firm insistence that the Irish issue, the divorce bill, and the mutual rights of expatriate citizens, must be settled before a future trade agreement could even be broached.

In three years, the UK three times gave in on issues it had posited as fundamental

This was, not incidentally, a crucial achievement for Irish diplomacy. The sequencing of the talks may sound like a technical issue. It was actually definitive, especially for Ireland.

In a way, Davis had a good point. It is a lot easier to say how borders, including the Irish one, would work, if you know whether or not you have frictionless trade.

But, politically speaking, this sequence would have been a disaster for Ireland. If you get everything agreed and there’s only the awkward Irish business standing in the way of a grand settlement, we all know who would get squeezed: come on Ireland, we’ve done our best for you, but you can’t hold everybody to ransom over your petty squabbles.

By helping to persuade the EU to be so firm on the sequence of the talks in June 2017, Ireland set the course for pretty much everything that has followed. And by capitulating on that same issue, Britain also set its course, which has been, behind all the bluster, a series of big concessions.

It is hard to remember, too, that Britain was not going to pay any divorce bill to Brussels. In July 2017, Johnson, then foreign secretary, was asked in the House of Commons: “Will you make it clear to the EU that if they want a penny piece more, then they can go whistle?”

He replied that “your words will have broken like a thunderclap over Brussels and they will pay attention to what you have said… and I think ‘to go whistle’ is an entirely appropriate expression.” The UK then meekly whistled up about £39 billion (€43 billion).

In February 2018, the European Commission published a draft withdrawal agreement that, to deal with the Irish Border question, proposed keeping Northern Ireland within the EU customs territory and a “common regulatory area” covering goods and sanitary and phytosanitary regulations.

This approach would require, if it ever came into force, customs and regulatory checks between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, an obvious undermining of the integrity of the UK itself. Theresa May said that "no UK prime minister could ever agree to" this proposal because it would threaten the "constitutional integrity of the UK".

For Ireland, in particular, it is necessary to go along with the fiction that damage limitation is victory

She was right about this, just as Davis had been, in some respects, right about the sequencing of the talks. Even leaving aside the implications for the Union, it is truly gobsmacking to negotiate your way into a having a free-trade zone smaller than your own actual borders. But this bottom line, again, proved to be porous.

After the whole saga of the backstop, this is where May’s successor Johnson ended up in October last year. In his meeting with Leo Varadkar on the Wirral, he agreed, in less than 90 minutes, to what “no UK prime minister could ever agree to”.

You don’t have to be a mathematical genius to see the pattern here. In three years, the UK three times gave in on issues it had posited as fundamental: the sequencing of talks, the payment of the divorce bill and the separation of Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK for the purposes of the customs union and the single market.

How many times, in return, did the EU concede on a fundamental issue? None. There have been the usual tactical shifts, but no deviation at all from the basic proposition the EU set out at the very start: the UK’s access to its market would be precisely calibrated according to its willingness to follow its rules.

There are two, closely related, reasons for this imbalance. One is that Britain has been unable to accept – and therefore try to work around – the reality that it is the weaker party. If you don’t see what you’re up against, you’re going to get slaughtered.

The other is the misplaced belief in bluff and pluck. Talk big and don’t flinch and the enemy will lose its nerve. This just doesn’t work when your bluff is called even before the talks begin and when your whole political system looks like it’s having a nervous breakdown. Who’s afraid of big bad Boris?

And yet, the more Britain has lost, the more it needs to be consoled and reassured. Deep down, Johnson and his allies know that the whole process has been unique in the history of the world: a free country negotiating itself out of a position of strength and influence and into one of vulnerability and uncertainty.

For Ireland, in particular, it is necessary to go along with the fiction that damage limitation is victory. Humiliation is politically toxic. Precisely because the reality has been so mortifying, pride must be salvaged.

So do say: Britain has played its part in a high-scoring thriller. Don’t say: this is a game that nobody wins.

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