Is Rishi Sunak’s Brexit deal all it’s cracked up to be?

Rishi Sunak’s ‘deal’ on the Northern Ireland Protocol is finally out. My first impression is that it is no ‘deal’ at all: the version of the text published by the government is a document with no legal effect that is possible to enforce. It’s a wish list of vague commitments.

The document is patronising in places: it refers to ‘saving money on a pint of beer, buying Cumberland sausages in a supermarket or visiting a garden centre for seeds and plants’. But there are also deeper concerns. Take paragraph 52: 

‘We also recognise, as we have done since 2020, that the Government needs to ensure that we monitor and tackle risks of regulatory divergence within the UK internal market‘          

The chance that the UK might, at some point, have different laws from the EU is described as a ‘risk’. It focuses here on internal divergence; but divergence internally only happens if we diverge from the EU – do you see how that works? This is the idea that the UK might diverge from the EU and pass a law that is better than one passed by them.