The EU’s strict enforcement of the Brexit deal has “destroyed cross-community consent” in Northern Ireland, Lord Frost has claimed.
The Brexit minister accused the EU of behaving “without regard to the huge political, economic and identity sensitivities” in the region.
He said that the Northern Ireland protocol, which was central to the withdrawal agreement signed by the UK and the EU in 2019, was threatening to undermine the Good Friday agreement despite being designed to protect it. Frost blamed this on the EU’s “overly strict” enforcement of the protocol.
He made the comments in the foreword to a paper for the Policy Exchange think tank that sets out how negotiations in the Brexit process have been hampered by decisions made in 2017.
Maros Sefcovic, the European Commission vice-president, urged Frost to reconsider the EU’s proposals to reduce checks on British goods entering Northern Ireland under the protocol and urged the UK not “embark on a path of confrontation”.
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He wrote in The Daily Telegraph: “I am increasingly concerned that the UK government will refuse to engage with this.”
The UK and the EU have put forward proposals to address the dispute over the agreement. The government has threatened to unilaterally suspend the protocol, which was negotiated by Frost, if the EU refuses to remove the European Court of Justice’s role in it.
The terms of the protocol effectively kept Northern Ireland in the single market, creating a border down the Irish Sea, which has angered unionists and hit the UK’s internal market.
Frost said: “We must return to the protocol and deliver a more robust and more balanced outcome than we could in 2019.”
He argues that a 2017 EU-UK joint report, which set the terms for the Brexit process, was a result of the UK failing to make “the necessary mental shift from being a member of the EU to negotiating exit from the EU”.
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He also claimed it was a result of the “extreme weakness” of the UK government after the election in June 2017.
The Policy Exchange paper, The Northern Ireland Protocol: The Origins of the Current Crisis by Roderick Crawford, provides a chronology of Brexit negotiations and what went wrong in 2017. It says that commitments, particularly on the Irish border, in the 2017 joint report were “a diplomatic triumph for Ireland and the (European) Commission” but “failing to secure adequate reciprocal concessions was a staggering failure for the UK”.
Crawford says the joint report — and what it committed the UK to — led to a flawed February 2018 draft withdrawal agreement in November 2018.
The paper says that led to the fall of Theresa May’s government in 2019 and “tied the hands” of the new government led by Boris Johnson that year as it renegotiated the terms of Brexit.
