Welcome Lords findings on problems with Northern Ireland Protocol

For many years it seemed as if the political establishment in London was above all concerned with placating Irish concerns over Brexit.

Such sensitivity to any return to a hard land border on this island was in most respects laudable. It showed that the UK wanted to maintain good relations with the Republic of Ireland, and to keep nationalists in Northern Ireland happy after the British rupture with the EU.

The problem was that this became the overwhelming concern with regard to Brexit and its impact on this side of the Irish Sea.

Theresa May’s government helped create the current political impasse in Northern Ireland by allowing the EU and Ireland to set the terms of the negotiation, and so as prime minister she pledged, for example, to rule out so much as CCTV at the land frontier (something to which polling found there was minimal opposition, even in nationalism).

Another feature of the establishment response in Britain has been various Westminster committees which talked of the need to protect the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement and of the need for an open land border.

This led to Mrs May’s backstop (which was not as good for unionists as is often claimed) and then Boris Johnson’s protocol betrayal. His rethink on the protocol has in turn led to endless claims of British bad faith and so on.

But in fact the atmosphere has changed even in Westminster within the last 18 months. There is now a cross-party understanding that the EU has been utterly inflexible, and that a rigorously implemented protocol would be disastrous.

Now a peer, Lord Jay, who chairs the House of Lords Committee on the NI Protocol has accepted that the post-Brexit agreement is causing economic and political instability in the Province. Lord Jay also recognised that the grace periods, for which the UK was criticised, need to become permanent.

It is a welcome intervention from the Lords.

All the more so when more and more people are pointing out Lord Trimble’s view of the damage done by the protocol to the 1998 deal.