The reappearance of dreaded "red lines" and a late-night Twitter exchange between Irish and UK politicians has set the scene for another difficult week ahead on Brexit and Northern Ireland.
In the days before the EU and UK attempt to iron out their differences over the Northern Ireland protocol – the Brexit trading arrangements that avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland – both sides are laying out quite publicly how far they are willing to go and dismissing where they won't, even before EU proposals on changes to the protocol have been published.
For the EU the plan is to offer what it sees as substantive and far-reaching changes to appease UK objections. These will lessen the paperwork burden on the Irish Sea economic border and make it easier to send goods to Northern Ireland from Britain, including easily identifiable British goods such as chilled goods that should take the sizzle out of the potential “sausage war”.
For the UK, this is just tinkering around the edges. London is pushing for more, much more. It is reopening the issue of UK sovereignty outside the EU again, seeking to rework the governance arrangements to remove the oversight role of the European Court of Justice, the EU's highest court, over the protocol. This is not just about shipping sausages from Birmingham to Belfast.
EU capitals will view the UK move as significant backtracking on a deal already reached between the sides in 2019 after years of protracted talks and a reopening of negotiations around the protocol, a move that Brussels has consistently rejected as a non-runner.
Twitter spat
Reacting to a snap of a Sunday Telegraph front page late on Saturday detailing UK plans to take unilateral action to suspend the protocol over the "red line" ECJ role, Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney took to Twitter at 11.22pm. He claimed the UK government was creating a "new 'red line' barrier to progress" that they knew the EU could not move on.
“Are we surprised?” he tweeted, adding that the real question was: does the UK government “actually want an agreed way forward or a further breakdown in relations?”
Just over an hour later, UK Brexit minister David Frost tweeted in response that he preferred not to do “negotiations by Twitter” but told Coveney that the UK government’s position was not new and that it had set out in a paper in July its objections to the European court’s oversight of the protocol.
That paper said the UK wanted to “normalise the governance basis” of the protocol so that the EU-UK relationship was “not ultimately policed” by the EU institutions, including the ECJ.
Frost replied that the UK would look at the EU’s proposals – due to be published on Wednesday – “seriously and positively” and would discuss them “seriously and intensively” but that there needed to be “significant change to the current situation if there is to be a positive outcome”.
Given that, under the protocol, Northern Ireland stays in the EU single market for goods, Brussels considers the oversight role of the ECJ over the protocol as a red line of its own, and European Commission vice president Maros Sefcovic said as much last week.
Regardless, Frost is expected to say in a speech on Tuesday – a day before the EU’s proposals are published – that the role of the ECJ and the inability to implement the protocol in a reasonable way “has created a deep imbalance in the way the protocol operates”.
Sovereignty mantra
It appears that the UK government is "trying to implode" the protocol and the wider EU-UK trade deal, says Fabian Zuleeg, chief economist at Brussels think-tank the European Policy Centre.
“If this was about finding practical solutions for some of the issues that are there, the ECJ hasn’t anything to do with that. This is the old mantra about sovereignty and the UK trying to distance themselves from the EU and score points for a domestic audience,” he says.
Patience with the UK government on Brexit has already worn thin in European capitals, and the offer of significant technical concessions this week will help shore up European unity.
Stalemate would push the situation to brinkmanship and raise the question of whether the UK is willing to pull the article 16 trigger to suspend the protocol, which could in turn spark the collapse of the wider EU-UK trade deal, the imposition of tariffs and a trade war.
Frost has said the grounds are already there for the UK to suspend parts of the protocol, but the tabling of proposals this week will be likely to lead to long and difficult discussions.
This week is unlikely to be about which side blinks first; there will just be a lot of staring.
