Sunak Pulls a Brexit Rabbit Out of His Hat

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen seemed equally happy when they announced the Windsor framework on Feb. 27. The deal is projected to end more than half a decade of Brexit-based upheaval in Northern Ireland and to begin—in the words of more than one British prime minister—to “get Brexit done.”

For years, since Britain formally left the European Union in 2020, Northern Ireland has existed under a legal stopgap regime called the Northern Ireland Protocol. It was intended to avoid a “hard border” between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland springing up at the very moment of a dramatic British exit from the European Union—something that, some feared, would spur disagreement, violence, and communal strife.

The protocol meant, in effect, that Northern Ireland would remain inside the EU in practical terms on a provisional basis so that the border with the Republic of Ireland could remain open and free from the kinds of documents and customs checks that are against the spirit of the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement of 1998. That agreement ended decades of violence, creating cross-border institutions with Ireland and recognizing the validity of both sets of claims to Northern Irish identity—Nationalists who wanted to reunite with Ireland and Unionists who saw themselves as British. The absence of a hard border with Ireland itself was key to that peace deal.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen seemed equally happy when they announced the Windsor framework on Feb. 27. The deal is projected to end more than half a decade of Brexit-based upheaval in Northern Ireland and to begin—in the words of more than one British prime minister—to “get Brexit done.”

For years, since Britain formally left the European Union in 2020, Northern Ireland has existed under a legal stopgap regime called the Northern Ireland Protocol. It was intended to avoid a “hard border” between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland springing up at the very moment of a dramatic British exit from the European Union—something that, some feared, would spur disagreement, violence, and communal strife.

The protocol meant, in effect, that Northern Ireland would remain inside the EU in practical terms on a provisional basis so that the border with the Republic of Ireland could remain open and free from the kinds of documents and customs checks that are against the spirit of the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement of 1998. That agreement ended decades of violence, creating cross-border institutions with Ireland and recognizing the validity of both sets of claims to Northern Irish identity—Nationalists who wanted to reunite with Ireland and Unionists who saw themselves as British. The absence of a hard border with Ireland itself was key to that peace deal.

The post-2020 protocol was an unhappy compromise in order to keep the border open. But it meant creating new barriers. For British and Northern Irish Unionists, this meant that Northern Ireland was effectively split off from the rest of the United Kingdom, with a de facto tdae border in the Irish Sea between it and the island of Great Britain.

In Northern Ireland under the protocol, some European laws would still apply, the European Court of Justice would have the final say over the interpretation of applicable EU laws, and, Northern Ireland could not legally follow any new practices introduced in Britain. Indeed, for British goods to arrive in Northern Ireland, they would have to be subject to customs checks and regulatory alignment.

This also had real economic consequences. Businesses that shipped between Northern Ireland and Great Britain had a difficult time adjusting. They had to pay far more on compliance. Their trucks were stopped and inspected at intolerable rates. They were compelled to follow two separate regulatory regimes to operate within one country. Many could not meet these new standards and pay these new fees, and business in and commerce to Northern Ireland dried up. Northern Irish “sales of goods to GB peaked in 2016, falling in the next two years before recovering slightly in 2019” and more strongly thereafter, according to Northern Ireland’s statistical authority. But crucially, the eventual recovery of trade was disproportionately in services rather than goods, which often remained restricted.

Some of the trades most affected were among the most important for daily life. There were periodic fears that medicines—regulated in Northern Ireland by both British medical regulators and European ones—might run out, with new supplies days away behind customs checks and extra paperwork. Similarly, rules about livestock transportation, the storage and shipping of meat, and food standards threatened to make food scarce or increase prices.

Northern Irish politics is very local and very messy. The region is run by a coalition of Nationalist and Unionist parties—uneasy bedfellows at the best of times—including the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), which is also represented at Westminster. The DUP propped up former Prime Minister Theresa May’s minority government between 2017 and 2019. For the DUP, these economic brakes were not just materially negative for Northern Ireland; they were a constitutional affront, proof that Britain’s sovereignty was fundamentally compromised.

When the DUP effectively vetoed May’s various Brexit deals, her government fell. When Boris Johnson’s government could operate without the DUP, and the party suffered electoral reverses in the 2019 general election and in local elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly, it was left a somewhat plaintive voice.

But the DUP’s tests for what would make a Brexit deal effective became a de facto benchmark for whether any new arrangement would be met with widespread support across the British Parliament.

The tests included avoiding biasing trade in Northern Ireland toward the EU rather than Great Britain; ending a possible border in the Irish Sea between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, rather than with the rest of the EU; stopping EU laws from applying to a Northern Ireland electorate that could not vote against them, and the same for EU courts unaccountable to U.K. laws; and the end of customs checks between one part of the United Kingdom and another, along with the same for regulation boundaries.

Other DUP red lines included the legal and constitutional equality of Northern Irish residents with the rest of the United Kingdom—and the continued abiding of every dot and comma of the Belfast Agreement, a point on which they were largely in agreement with the Nationalists. However inconvenient it might have been, the Good Friday deal was epochal.

The deal that has been reached is still a compromise, but in spirit, it goes most of the way to end most of these objections.

Goods from Great Britain will now largely be exempt from customs checks. Goods from Britain heading to Northern Ireland will be placed in the “green lane,” while a separate “red lane” will be used for goods likely to move into the EU’s jurisdiction. Those goods only destined to arrive in Northern Ireland will have both paperwork and customs checks diminished, while goods in the red lane, as before, will be subject to the previous inspections and checks.

Sunak believes this will decrease the friction of trade within the United Kingdom and make the Northern Irish economy more in tune with firms across the Irish Sea.

Meanwhile, in ending democratic deficit, Sunak has announced that the agreement will “scrap” 1,700 pages of EU laws that applied to Northern Ireland. Some EU regulations will survive, but these are, Sunak believes, an acceptable trade-off for Northern Ireland’s privileged access to European markets.

Similarly, a new procedure, the so-called Stormont Brake—named after the Northern Irish assembly building—will give Northern Ireland’s legislators the chance to veto new EU regulations regarding Northern Ireland—but only if the assembly can pull the cord on a cross-sectarian supermajority basis.

Medicines, a key area of anxiety for Northern Irish residents, will now be only regulated by U.K. regulators, rather than a mélange of U.K. and EU ones.

Sunak hopes that his compromise will represent the most acceptable deal that could possibly be agreed upon: safeguarding the hope of Northern Irish autonomy with greater access to both European markets and the rest of the United Kingdom, while installing new safety gauges to allow Northern Irish representatives greater control over the EU regulations and laws that will still apply to them.

By temperament, Sunak is a Brexiteer—a dogmatic supporter of leaving the EU at all costs. Unlike his predecessors—two of whom shared his inclinations if not his approach—Sunak is gambling that the right of his party, and the most vocal of the Northern Irish Unionists, will see this deal as the best possible. That’s a big deal. Tory leaders since John Major, who famously dubbed his party’s Eurosceptics “bastards,” have fallen victim to the party’s right on Europe.

He hopes they will not rebel or engage in bad-faith attacks and see this deal for what he and the European Commission claim it is: a solution to years of hard negotiation and desperate wrangling. That may be a big ask. But it’s a necessary one.

Britain needs to put Brexit behind it. The country has been occupied with treaties, protocols, endless parliamentary votes, and digressions for almost three-quarters of a decade.

Other crises have arisen in that time—COVID, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, global inflation—all of which have shown Britain and the European Commission that they need to reach amicable solutions as soon as possible to issues that seem almost luxurious in a period of raised international tension and permanent crisis.

For the moment, it seems Sunak has achieved something his predecessors hoped to manage but never could. The left-wing press, normally critical of Brexit as a project and the Conservatives as a party, say that Sunak appears to have pulled off a minor triumph—so much so that the opposition Labour Party might want to stop talking about Brexit for a while.

But Sunak’s success remains in the hands of Britain’s right and Northern Ireland’s unionists. His deal will live or die based on whether they have finally, at long last, developed a taste for diplomacy and compromise.