The Northern Ireland Assembly is set to vote to maintain the Windsor Framework, despite the trade barriers and political instability this post-Brexit trade deal brought to the Province.
Under power-sharing rules, controversial motions require cross-community support, meaning that they must gain backing from Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) in both the unionist and Irish nationalist designations at Stormont. For the Framework’s ‘democratic consent mechanism’, though, those safeguards have been set aside for the first time since the 1970s, when Ulster’s government was prorogued by Edward Heath.
As a consequence, this vote requires only a simple majority, effectively to ensure that the Irish Sea border remains in force for at least four more years. Irish nationalists and pro-EU liberals (who designate as ‘other’ in the Assembly) will support the motion, which cannot be vetoed by unionists, all of whom intend to vote against.
It was extraordinary that the then Conservative government agreed to effectively fiddle Stormont’s voting rules for this issue, which is the most incendiary question the Province has faced in decades. Northern Ireland’s place in the UK is being diluted, and its politicians will have no say over vast swathes of their own laws, including areas like immigration rules that have little to do with trade in goods.
Until relatively recently, of course, unionists enjoyed an outright majority at Stormont. Nationalists argued vehemently that majoritarianism was inappropriate for Northern Ireland’s divided society, and that rationale was largely accepted. Now that they can form a winning bloc, alongside so-called progressives in the Alliance Party, the principle of protecting ‘minority rights’ has been jettisoned.
In a further irony, this vote will take place just days before the sea border becomes substantially harder for consumers and businesses in Ulster. On Friday, burdensome new EU product safety laws come into force, and because the Province is effectively still in Brussels’ single market for goods, they will apply in Northern Ireland.
These General Product Safety Regulations (GPSR) require companies in Great Britain to provide substantially more information when they sell products to customers in the Province. Traders will also have to nominate a ‘responsible person’, based in Northern Ireland or the EU, to act as an on-the-ground agent.
Many companies have already announced that they will pull out of the Province’s market, as a result of these new requirements. Indeed, the GPSR could effectively destroy online sales from Great Britain to Northern Ireland. The impact is likely to be particularly severe on platforms like Amazon and eBay, where third party sellers often sell inexpensive items, many of them of uncertain origin.
A significant number of businesses will be unable to justify the extra time and cost required to sell goods to Northern Ireland. For customers in the Province, that means less choice, higher prices and more frustration, as items become unavailable. For businesses, their supply chain problems are likely to get even worse.
Earlier this year, the Government postponed until the spring rules that will require companies to send parcels from Great Britain to Northern Ireland through the red lane, which involves a full slate of customs processes, or the UK Internal Market Scheme (UKIMS). That supposedly slimmed down route was previously known as the ‘green lane’, but it was rebranded when Rishi Sunak struck his Safeguarding the Union deal with the DUP. Regardless of the terminology, it will not be straightforward to use.
From March, mainland companies that want to sell to Northern Ireland must become UKIMS trusted traders. When they send a parcel to the Province, they will be asked to provide an authorisation number and sign up to a lengthy set of declarations that their goods are not ‘at risk’ of entering the EU market.
There will be a penalty for getting this wrong, and businesses could be chucked out of the scheme. In addition, they are effectively being asked to vouch that customers in Northern Ireland will not move products on into the EU. And if any item cannot be proved categorically to be not ‘at risk’ of entering the bloc, then it must undergo the full rigours of the ‘red lane’.
You may remember that when Safeguarding the Union emerged in January, both the DUP and the government claimed that the sea border would effectively disappear. That assertion fell apart almost immediately, but it now looks even more ridiculous. GPSR shows that every time the EU adds red tape, Northern Ireland is pushed further from the mainstream UK market. The new Labour administration clearly does not believe that it is bound by outstanding aspects of Safeguarding the Union. And, in any case, many of the provisions that were put into legislation have already proved ineffective. While the service sector in Northern Ireland, which was not included in the Windsor Framework, is performing relatively well, manufacturers are struggling and their plight is likely to get worse.
Meanwhile, the idea that the Province would enjoy unique access to both the UK and the EU markets, attracting a deluge of inward investment, has proved a fantasy. Invest NI, the body that is charged with bringing foreign companies to Ulster, initially refused to divulge whether there was an uptick in foreign direct investment thanks to the Framework, on the basis that it wanted to avoid ‘disparaging comments’. Later, an official from Northern Ireland’s department of the economy confirmed that there was no influx of cash, because of the ‘evolving and uncertain’ state of trade with Great Britain. In other words, barriers between Great Britain and Northern Ireland were dissuading investors from coming to Ulster.
None of this will trouble the MLAs who vote to extend the sea border today. Nationalists have decided long ago that the Framework is a potential route to building an ‘all-Ireland economy’, as a prelude to breaking up the UK. They are determined to push ahead with that fantasy, irrespective of the pain it causes. Likewise, the ‘progressives’ in Alliance are committed to salvaging as much of the EU as possible, even if that means damaging Northern Ireland’s prosperity and diluting its place in the United Kingdom.
Some of the most prominent unionists, for their part, have proved depressingly powerless to meet these challenges. They are admittedly up against indifference from the Labour Government and a Conservative opposition that refuses to acknowledge the damage it did to the Union in office. But this story was also full of misjudgments, misunderstandings and missteps from the DUP and other unionist politicians.
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