The unloved backstop in May’s deal offers a new strategic advantage writes MATTHEW O'TOOLE in THE FT
In my hometown, as with a handful of others in Northern Ireland, there is an Irish Street, English Street and Scotch Street. They were named to reflect the origins of people who have lived alongside one another for centuries, without ever quite becoming one people.
These streets long predate the creation of Northern Ireland following partition in 1921; they predate the Act of Union between Britain and Ireland in 1801. At the most basic level, they reveal the enduring dilemma of that part of Ireland: how to accommodate more than one thing. How to live with ambiguity without antagonism. A task at which we have failed in the past with appalling consequences.
The Northern Ireland backstop is now routinely described as the central barrier, or stumbling block, in agreeing orderly terms for the UK’s withdrawal from the EU. This view has become conventional in London — particularly among Brexiters, but also many Remainers — with little attempt to understand the prior problem that required solving. This tendency has been compounded by the extraordinary power currently wielded at Westminster by the Democratic Unionist Party, which does not welcome ambiguous interpretations of Northern Ireland’s current status, nor of its history. It opposed the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, which enshrined the principle of consent (Northern Ireland remaining in the UK until a majority voted otherwise) but added several asterisks that qualified UK sovereignty.
That the DUP is the only party representing Northern Ireland in the Commons is itself further evidence of the place’s ambiguity. Sinn Fein, which holds the rest of the seats but does not take them, has never recognised the legitimacy of the UK parliament’s authority.
It is the persistence of this dividing axis in one small corner of Europe that was always — and I do mean always — going to complicate Brexit. But something more is happening: at the very moment Northern Ireland’s divisions again require subtle accommodation, Britain’s own divisions are making that impossible. Guided by the baleful influence of the DUP, whose guiding mission is to assert Northern Ireland’s unadulterated Britishness, Britain is becoming more like Northern Ireland.
Karen Bradley, the Northern Ireland secretary, was rebuked recently for implying precisely this — that the region’s divisions contain warnings for Britain at large. Northern Ireland, she wrote, “in particular, knows the damage that division can do”. Notwithstanding her previous confessed ignorance on the place she now governs — not knowing that unionists tended not to vote for nationalist parties, and vice versa — Ms Bradley was not wrong.
Brexit has created — or perhaps revealed and clarified — an intense division in British politics, and in British life. As in Northern Ireland, reality itself is increasingly defined by the split over EU membership. Contradictory narratives — of national self-harm versus thwarted national liberation — are congealing in the veins of Remainers and Leavers. Several studies, including a recent analysis by polling expert John Curtice, have shown how entrenched Remain or Leave identities have become: far more fundamental than attachment to any political party. Voters on each side are now invested in these identities in a way that prevents compromise.
There are clear limits to this analogy, dictated by respect for Irish history and its ancient and recent traumas. Britain is not the same as Northern Ireland, which is precisely the point of the backstop. It should, however, be careful about becoming any more like it, however maddening each side of the Brexit divide finds the perceived distortions of the other.
It is also wrong to imply both sides are as bad as each other: fault lies largely with the Brexiters, whose zeal has driven the country to this precipice. But whether Britain ends up leaving the EU or not, its divided society will need to a find a way of accommodating tribes that have become remarkably entrenched in little more than two and a half years.
In a few days, I travel back to Northern Ireland to spend Christmas. The place whose ambiguities are at the centre of Brexit, but where the views of most people are eerily absent from the debate in London. The backstop, unloved by virtually all sides in British politics, is mostly welcomed in a land that has learnt to live with constructive ambiguity. It remains a useful diplomatic concept as an alternative to purity and further division.
The backstop guarantees Northern Ireland access to both UK and European markets. It offers the place something it has rarely known: strategic advantage. The chance to put its contradictions to a more productive use rather than hostility.
If only divided Britain would give it the chance.