If Boris can survive September, the EU may rethink its stubborn stance

Published in The Daily Telegraph

It was always predictable how the first few weeks of Boris Johnson’s premiership would play out. It would have been astonishing to see him abandoning his demands to “scrap the backstop” right after entering office. The same can be said about the EU side, which has repeated ad nauseam that the binding part of the Brexit deal agreed by Theresa May is non-negotiable. 

Now, ahead of the Biarritz G7 Summit, and as the Prime Minister prepares to meet his counterparts in Paris and Berlin, things are getting more interesting. Johnson has come out with a document detailing – to an extent – how his Government wants to renegotiate the binding part of the deal. This was swiftly followed by the EU side – including Ireland – ruling out any renegotiation of the Withdrawal Agreement, with the EU Commission arguing that the Government’s “letter doesn’t provide a legal operational solution to prevent the return of a hard border”.

In other words: the European side is telling Boris Johnson to explain how he would solve the border conundrum. It’s the EU’s view that this may well take up to 15 years. At least that’s what Austria’s leading diplomat charged with Brexit estimates. The UK Government does admit that “alternative arrangements” may not be ready by the end of the transition stage, on 1 January 2023, but Boris Johnson vows in his letter to "look (...) at what commitments might help" so to reassure the EU that he is interested in a solution.

It used to be the case that many in the EU were hoping Brexit would simply not happen. By now, the chances of Brexit being stopped have flattened, partly due to the Brexit Party's success in the European elections. The EU side is nevertheless still hoping that Parliament will somehow depose Johnson and his Government, with a successor requesting another extension of the UK’s membership which would then be followed by the UK agreeing to the terms of the Withdrawal Agreement negotiated by Theresa May. Few have considered how Parliament would pass this – after an election which may terminate the careers of many Remain-supporting MPs.

The first week of September, therefore, will be crucial. It should give an indication of the chances that Boris Johnson will still be Prime Minister by the end of October. The EU knows this; so do not expect any major concessions from them until the situation in Parliament becomes clear.

After that, rationally, there should be movement. One would expect the EU to at least have some kind of “plan B” in case it did need to make some concessions, and it's not difficult to imagine what this would look like; likely an offer to make the backstop time-limited, for, say, 20 years. This offer would then of course need to be communicated by the Irish government, so it doesn’t appear as if the other EU members had pressured one of the smaller member-states. 20 years would of course be unacceptable to the UK, but we should not forget that when the EU wants a finger, it asks for an arm. Even those more wary about making concessions to Boris Johnson in the EU could support such a plan B - it would at least shift the blame away from the EU for any ensuing “no deal” disruption.

The Prime Minister, meanwhile, now thinks “an agreement is possible” on “a” Withdrawal Agreement, which should build confidence among EU countries that Boris is not aiming for “no deal” and that any concessions made by the EU won’t be futile. If the UK government now becomes more specific about what it wants to replace the backstop with, this would deal with EU concerns that Boris has only promised to “look at” a possible solution in case alternative arrangements wouldn’t be ready by the end of the transition period. The work of Prosperity UK is inspirational here. 

However, if the EU refuses to discuss reopening the binding part of the deal even if it is clear that the alternative is, in fact, Britain leaving without one, Brussels will truly be responsible for no deal. Denmark won concessions in 1992 and there are several precedents of the EU reconsidering deals agreed with governments after referendums and parliamentary votes contesting them. Importantly, Theresa May did tell EU leaders in November that she could very well fail to push the deal through Parliament, so the UK cannot be accused of having acted in bad faith here.

It is fair to demand that Boris comes up with more detail, but how responsible is it to continue to refuse any changes whatsoever to a draft agreement which both sides knew had a slim chance of being accepted by Parliament? The Irish Times reports that “there is as yet no real detail” provided by the Irish government “about how the border will be managed in the event of no-deal”. So a disruptive “no deal” troubling the peace process is not all that far-fetched, sadly, unless the Irish government decides to throw all of its obligations to guard the EU’s external border out of the window.

In his letter, Boris Johnson writes that the EU "presents the whole of the UK with the choice of remaining in a customs union and aligned with those rules, or of seeing Northern Ireland gradually detached from the UK". When the UK is attempting to formulate compromises, the time has come for the EU to make a move towards abandoning their excessive demand.