Alyn Smith: European question set to dominate politics in UK

For the life of me I can’t get 800 words out of it, so completely vacuous a thing that it was. At a time of national crisis, Mr Johnson’s speech was almost entirely devoid of content. The best description I’ve read was from the excellent Andrew Rawnsley in Sunday’s Observer that “never before have I heard a leader’s speech in which virtually every other sentence was a punchline in search of a guffaw”. Quite.

However, the UK Tories, like the SNP in Scotland, are blessed in their opponents. The SNP at Westminster will do what we can, but arithmetic is against us and the hapless Labour Party continues to be more interested in fighting each other than the Government. But the fault lines beneath Mr Johnson’s government are there to see if we look hard enough, and I’ve been working on the biggest one for years: Europe.

The European question is fundamental to the case for independence. It will also define the next few years of UK politics while the Tories gradually accept that their country is a middle-ranking European state that is incapable of doing much independently on the world stage. Or maybe they will continue in their delusions; it will be one or the other.

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But the indications right now are that they are going to blame everyone but themselves for the consequences of what they wanted, and delivered, and put to the electorate and won an 80-seat majority upon. The Northern Ireland Protocol is an integral part of the UK-EU deal which is barely 18 months old and was signed by this government as a solemn international treaty.

Mr Johnson described the deal as “oven-ready”. Lord Frost from his unassailable position in the House of Lords described the deal as “excellent”, yet barely months later the Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis casually talked of breaching it – but “only in a limited and specific way” as if this was somehow commonplace in international relations. It is not.

But all the indications are that they seem hell-bent on carrying on this reckless path, doing the most damage to the fragile peace process in Northern Ireland – and that should worry us all.

The EU at least is trying to find solutions, and there will be new proposals related to the protocol today which seem already to have been rejected by the UK Government. It seems inevitable the UK will trigger Article 16 – the dispute resolution process within the agreement – triggering four weeks of talks.

The UK side can be relied upon to ramp up the rhetoric during this period, though I think it virtually inevitable that the Government will eventually unilaterally suspend the protocol – probably citing trade diversion in that a lot of business is now reorienting to the EU away from GB because Northern Ireland-Great Britain trade is more complex than it was.

This is to my mind an obvious consequence, and I would say benefit, to the protocol. But it is anathema to Unionist politicians in Northern Ireland with an Assembly election looking in May, as well as being a useful strawman for the Tories to ramp up UK-EU tensions and present the EU as unreasonable.

So bear with me in the hypothesis: once the UK has taken unilateral steps to suspend the protocol, the EU has a dilemma. There must be consequences, it has no appetite to erect a border on the island of Ireland, but we should be in no doubt it will retaliate against the UK.

I’ve seen disputes like this before, as has everyone in Brussels, unlike in London. Unlike internal disputes with Hungary and Poland the UK is not in the EU so there will be much less squeamishness. The EU will retaliate with surgical precision, targeting sensitive economic interests, in politically sensitive parts of the country designed to cause as much pain as possible.

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This will be painful for business, farmers, consumers – everybody in the UK – but with this UK Government I would be concerned they will simply use it to blame the country’s economic woes on the EU and keep this rhetoric going right up to the next election.

What that rhetoric will do for relations, goodness only knows. What about the millions of EU nationals living here? The millions of UK nationals across the EU? What will it mean for peace in Northern Ireland? What will a daily tsunami of anti-EU rhetoric do for popular opinion? I hope that the people of Scotland will not be fooled. We didn’t after all want Brexit in the first place, but we’ll need to be vigilant and vocal.

Scotland’s best future is as an independent state within the EU, and every problem Brexit and this hapless Tory government inflict upon us has an answer – independence in Europe. It is not for nothing that the Irish have developed or boosted 40 new routes into the EU bypassing the UK altogether, they’re wise to do so.

It saddens me to say it but I don’t see the Irish, or Scottish, difficulties accessing the EU market via the UK land bridge being resolved any time soon.