By Cameron Hilditch
Sunday, September 20, 2020
After a spring and summer dominated by the pandemic and
the lockdown, the U.K. and the EU are back to fighting about Brexit. In other
words, nature is healing.
The latest fracas between the two feuding divorcées
involves the British Internal Markets Bill, which was introduced by Boris Johnson’s
government last week. The purpose of the bill is to ensure barrier-free trade
between all four constituent nations of the United Kingdom (England, Scotland,
Wales, and Northern Ireland) and to guarantee that other countries have access
to the entirety of the U.K. market when they cut trade deals when the British
government.
Americans are likely to greet this news with bemused
puzzlement. How is all of this not already the case? After all, free trade
between the states has been the sine qua non of American nationhood
since the ratification of the Constitution in 1787. In fact, the regulation of
interstate commerce was the primary role envisioned for Congress by the
Founders. Furthermore, trade deals signed by the Federal government have always
embraced the whole of the American market. How can a nation-state even exist
without these basic building blocks of national sovereignty?
The answer is that it can’t. For the last four and a half
decades the United Kingdom hasn’t been a nation-state at all. It’s been
the provincial, western outpost of an aspiring Federated European super-state.
Ever since the U.K. entered the European Union, EU law and jurisprudence has
been supreme over domestic law. Regulations, customs, and trade standards have
been set by the EU institutions in Brussels and imposed upon every country in
the bloc. In other words, the customs and market regulations that are a
foundational prerogative of functional nation-states have been usurped on the
European continent by a supra-national pan-continental bureaucracy. Napoleon
Bonaparte would be proud.
But now that the U.K. is bidding farewell to this
ill-conceived and ill-begotten project, the British government has to resume
control of its internal market regulations, which is what this bill does. It
merely restores to Her Majesty’s government the plenary domestic power over
trade and regulation that almost every other government in the world takes for
granted.
So, why all the fuss?
The problem, as ever in these negotiations, is Northern
Ireland. It’s the only part of the U.K. that shares a land border with a member
of the EU — the Irish Republic. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998, which put an
end to the decades-long civil conflict in the province between Protestant
unionists and Catholic secessionists, established an open border on the island
of Ireland so that people and goods could travel seamlessly between North and
South. This was a rather easy measure to implement because both the U.K. and
the Republic of Ireland were in the EU at the time, and so they were bound by
the same customs and market regulations.
The sticking point in the exit negotiations between the
British and EU delegations was how to maintain an open border in Ireland once
the U.K. had left the EU regulatory framework. Differing regulations and
standards between the two countries could, without any physical border
infrastructure, lead to rampant smuggling and undermine the internal integrity
of the EU market. But all sides balked at the idea of putting up a hard border
between Northern Ireland and the Republic given the violent history and
still-volatile politics surrounding the constitutional question. Sinn Fein, the
political wing of the Provisional IRA terrorist organization, made thinly
veiled threats (as they are wont to do) that if such an option was considered,
we could see a return to mass-murder on the streets of Belfast.
And so, after becoming prime minister last year, Boris
Johnson signed on to a Withdrawal Agreement that left Northern Ireland within
the economic structures of the EU. All EU regulations on trade and customs
would continue to apply in Northern Ireland even after it had legally left the
EU along with the rest of the U.K. Essentially, this amounted to a regulatory
annexation of sovereign British territory by a foreign power (ably and
obligingly aided by the British prime minister).
Of course, this was never going to work in the long term.
No government can function properly when a huge swath of its territory is in
chattel to a foreign power. How could the American federal government enforce
regulations equally in Texas and Tennessee in a scenario where Texas was
obliged to conform itself to the internal market regulations of Mexico?
The prime minister never should have signed the
Withdrawal Agreement, and many of his colleagues told him so at the time. But
he was desperate to get Brexit officially and legally over the line, and so he
punted on how exactly the government would make all of it work.
Last week, with the introduction of the Internal Markets
Bill, the rubber hit the road. By the British government’s own admission, the
bill violates the Withdrawal Agreement signed onto with the EU, albeit only in
“a very specific and limited way,” in the words of Northern Ireland secretary
Brandon Lewis. Specifically, it violates Article IV, which establishes the
Agreement’s supremacy over U.K. law. The British government has taken this
measure because they want their own ministers to decide what goods arriving in
Northern Ireland from Great Britain should be subject to EU customs checks. In
other words, the government is reasserting its sovereignty over Northern
Ireland now that the U.K. is safely out of the EU by deliberately violating
international law.
Boris Johnson has said that the measure is “protective”
in nature, and necessary because of the way that the EU has tried to “leverage”
their regulatory conquest of Northern Ireland in trade negotiations with the
British government. During these negotiations, it is alleged, the EU has
threatened to ban the sale of British agricultural products in the EU. This
action would, under the terms of the Withdrawal Agreement, involve banning the
importation of food from Great Britain to Northern Ireland. You read that
right: According
to the British government’s chief negotiator David Frost, the EU has
threatened to impose an internal food blockade within the United Kingdom
between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Faced with what they clearly view
as an insulting ultimatum, the Conservative government decided to violate the
agreement they had wrongly signed up to in the first place.
And this is when the Democrats jumped in. As my colleague
Madeleine Kearns has outlined,
Nancy Pelosi was the first to suggest that the British government’s decision
threatens the “Good Friday Accords,” which, incidentally, do not exist. There
is a Good Friday Agreement, to be sure, but, as far as I am aware, no sequel
exists to warrant Pelosi’s use of the plural form of the noun. The probable
cause of her error is ignorance. But in any case, it looks like Joe
Biden has decided to join her in giving the party line.
It cannot be said often or loudly enough that equating
the measures in the Withdrawal Agreement with the enforcement of the Good
Friday Agreement is completely unsupportable. Biden and Pelosi are wrong on
this issue, and predictably so. The Democratic Party has always viewed Ireland
through the eyes of their Irish American voters, who in turn view their
ancestral homeland in an attenuated, folkloric, and often ahistorical way.
NORAID, or the Irish Northern Aid Committee, was a hugely popular organization
among Irish Americans during latter half of the last century. Its members
exerted massive political and financial influence over American policy in
Ireland and put millions of dollars into the pockets of organized murderers.
This was not, to be sure, out of any knowing or deliberate malice. The
ignorance afforded by distance allowed many Irish Americans of good faith to
draw a simple analogy between George Washington and the Minute Men on the one
hand, and Gerry Adams and the IRA on the other. They little suspected that the
“freedom-fighters” whom they funded were in the habit of abducting
and executing disabled children.
Joe Biden is famously proud of his Irish roots, so it’s
likely that he has inherited this Irish American preference for romantic myth
over gruesome reality to some extent. But if he would care to look more closely
at the issues in question, he would learn that the European annexation of
Northern Ireland was never necessary in order to preserve peace in Northern
Ireland. In fact, it amounts to a far more egregious violation of the Good
Friday Agreement than the Internal Markets Bill.
First of all, the EU is well aware that the necessary
technology exists for frictionless trade to continue between Northern Ireland
and the Irish Republic even under two entirely different regulatory regimes.
The EU Parliament published an entire study in 2017 detailing how this could be
done. The study is called “Smart Border 2.0: Avoiding a hard border on the
island of Ireland for Customs control and the free movement of persons,” and is
publicly
available. The EU’s aggressive stance towards Northern Ireland is not born
of any concern to avert the need for border infrastructure. It has always been
political. Dominic Raab, the current British Foreign Secretary and former
Brexit negotiator, said as much in an interview for the Sunday Times in
2018. Raab is hardly a neutral observer, but the account of a man who was at
the center of negotiations cannot be dismissed out of hand:
There were certainly swirling dark
forces in the commission, which you would hear rumbling that Northern Ireland
was the price the United Kingdom must pay for leaving the EU . . . That’s
totally irresponsible and reckless and not something we should give in to. The
EU has become incredibly controlling and I think that’s a sign of their
insecurity as an organisation.
In addition to the dishonesty and irresponsibility of the
EU’s feigned pretext for claiming Northern Ireland as its own, it also needs to
be pointed out that the Withdrawal Agreement itself actively threatens the
integrity of the Good Friday Agreement. The legal basis for Northern Ireland’s
place in the United Kingdom is the 1801 Act of Union. Article VI in the Act of
Union created a Customs Union that still encompasses the six counties that make
up Northern Ireland to this day. Furthermore, one of the central commitments
made by all parties in the Good Friday Agreement is that no change to the
constitutional status of Northern Ireland will be permitted without the democratic
consent of the majority. If violating the Act of Union does not change the
constitutional status of Northern Ireland, then nothing does. Contrary to what
Joe Biden seems to believe, the Good Friday Agreement has already been
flagrantly violated by the European Union, with Boris Johnson coming in clutch
in an ignominious assist.
On top of all this, the EU isn’t in a position to lecture
anyone about the sacrosanct inviolability of international law. As the former
conservative member of the European Parliament Daniel Hannan wrote yesterday
for Conservative
Home:
The EU, for example, is in breach
of several trade agreements, ranging from its groundless bans on overseas
agricultural produce to its illicit Airbus subsidies. It also frequently
violates its own treaties, sometimes on issues of enormous consequence. The
eurozone bailouts, for example, were patently illegal, not just in the sense
that they had no basis in the European treaties, but in the sense that they
were expressly prohibited. No one in Brussels tried to claim otherwise. Rather,
they pleaded raison d’état.
The British government violated an international
agreement. But they did so in order to remedy the previous violation of a far
more important agreement, one that has brought an end to violence in one of the
most ravaged and war-torn corners of the modern world.
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