What was perhaps most interesting about his speech was what it didn’t contain. The biggest breakthroughs that had been reported by journalists were not in Gove’s speech. Although he claimed that ‘Northern Ireland’s supermarket supplies’ would be ‘protected’, Gove gave no details of a trusted trader scheme nor of exemptions or derogations. Instead, there would be ‘a grace period for supermarkets to update their procedures’, and ‘up to 12 months’ for the medicines industry to adapt as necessary to the Protocol rules to maintain those critical supplies. The promise of ‘further measures of financial support, helping businesses and communities to prosper and thrive from the end of the year and beyond’ rings a little hollow when considering the scale of adjustment that NI businesses are having to make in a context of pandemic-induced crisis.
‘Brextensity’ on top of crisis seems as cruel as it is unnecessary. At least now the Protocol should come fully into force without it being the subject of legal action by the EU against the UK. But the significant progress made is just at the level of decision-making, which should have been completed months ago. The lows and highs of the drama at the start of this week may have played well to a certain audience, but they have felt insulting and exhausting to those who simply want to know what to do to keep in business in less than three weeks.
Northern Ireland is not ‘sorted’. There are two things Northern Ireland urgently needs.
First, detailed information and clear answers to questions, and reasonable time and ‘grace’ to adapt. Moreover, the operational systems for the new procedures need to be at least functional. Obviously. And, secondly, above all else, we need a UK-EU deal. It has always been the case that the further apart the UK and the EU sit, the more difficult it would be for Northern Ireland to remain in the middle, closely attached to both. If there is No Deal, then no amount of mitigations or packages (or, indeed, sovereignty-swagger) will compensate for the disruption it will cause to the UK’s internal market and, longer-term, Northern Ireland’s place within it.
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2020/12/10/48-hours-of-brextensity-northern-ireland-is-not-sorted/
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