Owen Polley: The Irish Sea border looms again as the new parliamentary term starts

(The last sentences of Owen Polley’s column last week were inadvertently cut from the print edition. Click here to read it: ‘We have not openly debated immigration and integration in the UK’)​

The Stormont Assembly is due back to work on the same day.

After a tough general election campaign, MPs, MLAs and party strategists have had a chance, over the summer, to think about their plans for the autumn and the years ahead. Many of the difficulties that Northern Ireland faces will be the same, but they must be tackled in a very different political landscape.

It is fair to say that unionists still see the Irish Sea border as our biggest, most immediate problem, even if they have different ideas about how it should be dealt with. At the election, some candidates emphasised the protocol and the framework less than others, but they all expressed opposition to their existence. Earlier in the summer, Labour’s Europe minister, Mick Thomas-Symonds, headed to Brussels, to discuss Britain’s links with the EU under a new government. During the election campaign, Sir Keir Starmer said that Labour was seeking a ‘reset’ with its nearest neighbour.

That created excitement among some unionists, who thought that a more friendly relationship with Brussels might involve dismantling trade barriers between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The assumption was that the whole United Kingdom would soon be aligned more closely with the EU and aspects of the Irish Sea border would become redundant.

Starmer has certainly criticised Boris Johnson’s ‘botched’ trade deal, but that does not mean that he has asked for a major renegotiation. Before the new prime minister made it to Number 10, Michel Barnier (remember him) warned that the EU would not grant Britain full access to its single market for goods, unless we accepted the bloc’s three other ‘freedoms’, including the free movement of labour.

Ministers have ruled that out, describing their policy as a ‘red line’. And, in April, Labour opposed a plan for freedom of movement between the UK and the EU for people under 30 years old. The recent protests and disorder over immigration will make it even trickier to reverse out of those positions.

From a Northern Irish perspective, the prime minister’s commitment to build ‘closer trading ties’ might seem like a potential solution to our problems. But in the rest of the UK, it is just as likely to be interpreted merely as a promise to ease some of the delays and IT glitches suffered at channel ports, when food and other products arrive there from the continent.

The government has set out in vague terms some of the things it wants to achieve with the EU, but when things have got more specific, Northern Ireland has scarcely been mentioned.

For example, before the holidays intervened, the foreign secretary, David Lammy, said he was seeking a so-called ‘EU-UK security pact’. The implication was that it would cover defence, as well as mutual issues around immigration, climate change and pandemics.

In fact, the UK’s relative military power, compared to other European countries, is one of the few areas where it has a negotiating edge over the EU. It would be a bad sign if the government intended to offer greater cooperation in these areas for free, without requiring some more reasonable behaviour from Brussels on economic matters.

On a similar note, it’s possible that the government will use Northern Ireland’s predicament as a way of proving its honest intentions towards Brussels. When he visited Stormont after winning the election, the prime minister implied that his administration would implement the NI Protocol and Windsor Framework in full.

That was an ominous pledge.

Despite the effects of the Irish Sea border, and irrespective of the difficulties yet to come, the EU has consistently claimed that the government has not imposed barriers between Great Britain and Northern Ireland hard or fast enough.

Does the prime minister really accept that interpretation, or has he simply adopted a more diplomatic tone? That’s one of the things that unionists will have to establish, as they decide how best to influence the new government.

One challenge is fast approaching, as the EU is set to change its product safety rules in December. Thanks to the protocol, these regulations will apply in Northern Ireland. For example, companies from the mainland will be required to have an EU-based ‘responsible person’ in place to send goods here. For smaller traders in England, Scotland and Wales, the cost and paperwork that involves is likely to persuade them to pull out of our market altogether.

That will be a key test for the new government. Will it stand by the promises made by previous administrations to protect trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland? It could appeal to the EU to make an exception for Northern Ireland, or it could impose similar rules across the UK, as the King’s Speech suggested might be the case.

On the other hand, Labour could be the kind of ‘rigorous implementers’ that were always demanded by Brussels, Dublin, and their proxies in the nationalist parties and Alliance.

These looming problems will test the ingenuity of unionist politicians. They simply want the protocol and framework gone, but, certainly as regards the DUP and UUP, it seems they’ve decided that that’s not going to happen. So they’re hoping to try to manage the sea border’s effects for the time being.

The effectiveness of that strategy will very shortly be put to the test.

• The last few sentences of Owen’s column last Monday were inadvertently cut out of the print edition. Here it is in full