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Does the Windsor deal herald warmer ties between Britain and the EU? by Charles Grant, 1 March 2023 The Windsor deal on the Northern Ireland protocol may herald warmer UK-EU ties. It has strengthened von der Leyen and Sunak. But the Retained EU Law bill promises trouble. Nearly seven years after the referendum on EU membership, Brexit is finally done – in the sense that the legal framework for UK-EU relations has been settled. There will of course be continual negotiations between London and Brussels, probably until Doomsday – the Trade and Co-operation Agreement (TCA) is set for review in 2026 – but the basic structure of the relationship is set for many years to come. The final part of that structure – the section of the Withdrawal Agreement known as the Northern Ireland Protocol – fell into place on February 27th, when Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Commission President Ursula von der Leyen signed off on the ‘Windsor Framework’, a document that covers the implementation of the protocol. The agreement in Windsor may well herald a much happier period in EU-UK relations. But not everything will be tickety-boo. A row is looming over the British government’s insistence on pushing ahead with the Retained EU Law (REUL) Bill, currently in the House of Lords. Soon after Boris Johnson struck a deal with the EU in October 2019 on the Withdrawal Agreement, including the Northern Ireland protocol, the British government demanded that the protocol be changed. It had some strong arguments: the protocol required checks on goods flowing from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, which inconvenienced some businesses and consumers in that region. Furthermore, the application of EU law to Northern Ireland, with the consequent role for the European Court of Justice (ECJ), threatened many unionists’ sense of British identity. But the EU refused to change the protocol, arguing that in order to avoid a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, the former had to stay in the EU’s single market for goods, and that required a border in the Irish Sea. The deadlock over the protocol continued for three years. Negotiations gathered momentum after Sunak became prime minister in October 2022. Sunak and his ministers and officials worked hard for a settlement, but a deal could not have been reached without the Commission – an institution not known CER INSIGHT: Does the Windsor deal herald warmER ties between Britain and the EU? 1 March 2023
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