AGREEMENT between Rishi Sunak and Ursula von der Leyen will not resolve the impasse in Northern Ireland.
Nothing in these negotiations is as it seems.
The Irish, republican or unionist, were not represented in talks between Brussels and London, carried out over their heads in a process that “confirms the life experience of many colonised and dominated peoples,” in the words of the Communist Party of Ireland. Indeed their interests are the last thing on the negotiators’ minds, since “the talks are about securing Britain’s future relationship with the EU, not about the Irish people.”
Similarly, revisions to the Northern Ireland Protocol are unlikely to get Stormont working again.
The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) is genuinely angered by a customs border between Northern Ireland and Britain.
But its deeper anxiety is related to Sinn Fein’s breakthrough to become the largest party in the Assembly last year and its right, therefore, to the position of First Minister.
A Northern Irish first minister committed to Irish reunification is anathema to the DUP. Its boycott of the government has, through inducing complete political paralysis in Northern Ireland, so far prevented the realisation of this nightmare.
DUP intransigence is not Sunak’s only headache. Tory backbenchers are on manoeuvres to oppose any deal they see as undermining Brexit — and Sunak’s old boss scents an opportunity for a political comeback.
Boris Johnson cares no more for Ireland than he does about Brexit. He famously wrote two newspaper columns simultaneously ahead of the EU referendum, one supporting Remain and one Leave, before calculating that a Leave posture would deliver more for his own career.
That calculation was correct. Not only did Brexit destroy the David Cameron and Theresa May premierships and clear his way to No 10, the “get Brexit done” mantra was enough, combined with a suicidal Labour policy of holding another referendum, to bag him a big parliamentary majority in 2019.
Now he hopes it will be the gift that keeps on giving. We can expect artificial outrage over supposed betrayal of Northern Ireland; Johnson’s groupie Jacob Rees-Mogg says the ex-PM will have a lot to say on the deal as the “biggest figure in UK politics.”
Johnson hopes that with Labour enjoying a commanding lead in the polls, a desperate Tory Party might summon him back as a proven election winner.
It might. But it is unclear whether any Tory leader could overcome the party’s neoliberal extremism or vested interest in Britain’s broken economic settlement, which prevent it from taking the sort of meaningful action on the crisis in living standards and public services that might improve its polling.
Johnson, as ever, does not offer a way forward — but he does possess considerable destructive power. He may be able to bring down the Sunak premiership. If that means inflaming a potentially violent form of Ulster unionism this is unlikely to trouble him.
Socialists must call out this reckless opportunism, but also point to the only real way forward — a final end to Irish partition.
Stormont’s frozen institutions symbolise a deeper freeze: the barrier partition forms to progress, north and south.
Even the Good Friday Agreement, with its specification of the exact form Northern Irish politics must take, acts to trap the Six Counties in a framework so inflexible that boycott by a single party brings the entire statelet to a halt — without mentioning the way its provisions have been exploited in bids to override democratic decision-making elsewhere, as with the court cases seeking to use it to prevent Brexit.
Northern Ireland has changed. So too has British imperialism. It is clearer than ever that partition is a dead end, appealing to a diminishing constituency of hard-line sectarians and exploited to justify reactionary agendas in London, Brussels and Dublin.
British socialists should show maximum support and solidarity for all those fighting for a united Ireland.
