LONDON — Rishi Sunak’s grumbling backbenchers could get a chance to vote on his impending deal on post-Brexit trading arrangements in Northern Ireland, the British prime minister indicated Wednesday.
Arch-Brexiteers from Sunak’s ruling Conservatives are currently holding their breath as the prime minister tries to get a deal with the European Union on the Northern Ireland protocol over the line. Sunak hopes to keep his MPs and the region’s Democratic Unionist Party onside with his efforts to reform the contentious protocol.
During the weekly prime minister’s questions joust in parliament, Labour leader Keir Starmer asked Sunak if he would allow MPs a vote on any deal.
“Of course parliament will express its view,” Sunak replied, in his first public hint that a deal with the EU could be voted on in parliament.
Speaking immediately after PMQs, Sunak’s spokesperson would not confirm a Commons vote will happen and said the government is “not going to get ahead of ourselves.”
“We don’t have a deal yet so I’m not going to get into hypotheticals. There is nothing to vote on yet,” the spokesperson added.
The Northern Ireland protocol keeps the region — part of the U.K. — aligned with the EU in key areas in a bid to avoid a hard border at the politically-sensitive frontier with the Republic of Ireland, an EU member. But the U.K. government argues the setup creates unacceptable barriers between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom, and the DUP is boycotting power-sharing in the region until its demands for change are met.
DUP demands
Tory MPs are keeping a close eye on the DUP, whose leader Jeffrey Donaldson on Wednesday urged Sunak to not just “tweak” the protocol but to instead rewrite “the legally-binding treaty text.”
“[The protocol] must be replaced with arrangements that are acceptable and restore our place in the U.K. and its internal market, ” Donaldson added.
Donaldson’s position reflects his “seven tests” policy declaration in July 2021 and the political reality that, if he is going to avoid a damaging split within his party, he must achieve something he can sell as a “successor” agreement to the protocol — a “replacement.”
A senior DUP official said the party now will re-enter Stormont and seek re-election in the next Northern Ireland Assembly vote only on the basis that it has achieved its protocol “seven tests.”
This means, the official said, the U.K. and EU must unveil “a successor text” to the protocol that “unambiguously addresses” each of those seven points, not merely a series of technical agreements that buttress the existing protocol text as the EU has insisted.
“Others may not always have taken seriously what Sir Jeffrey said, but they are learning now that we have always meant what we said. For us the seven tests is the fundamental measuring stick for ensuring our constitutional position in the United Kingdom is restored and respected,” the official said.
The DUP, renowned for its refusal to compromise, has adopted this type of position before – and stuck to it for nearly a decade – when it boycotted multi-party talks involving the Irish Republicans of Sinn Féin and rejected Northern Ireland’s original Good Friday Agreement of 1998.
It never officially accepted that U.S.-brokered pact and, by harnessing unionist antipathy to cooperation with Irish republicans, soon became the most popular party in Northern Ireland.
The DUP didn’t agree to begin cooperating in a Stormont government with Sinn Féin until after the DUP could pin its own policy pivot to a successor power-sharing deal, the St. Andrew’s Agreement of 2006. It could claim to its own supporters to have “fixed” and “replaced” the Good Friday Agreement’s failures by refusing to bury the hatchet with Sinn Féin until its core demands were met.
Starmer’s push
U.K. Opposition leader Starmer — who has promised that his party will back a deal if it comes to a Commons vote — meanwhile hopes to use the protocol issue to drive a wedge between Sunak and his Brexiteer backbenchers.
“The prime minister is biting his tongue, but at some point the irreconcilables on his benches are going to twig and they are going to come after him,” Starmer said.
A deal looks increasingly unlikely to come before the weekend.
In a conversation with Ursula von der Leyen Tuesday night, Sunak and the European Commission president agreed that progress has been made and to talk again in the “coming days,” according to Sunak’s spokesperson.
