Boris Johnson has said he will find it “very difficult” to vote for Rishi Sunak’s revised deal for post-Brexit trade arrangements in Northern Ireland, arguing that the plan ties the UK to EU regulations that will crush efforts to innovate and diverge.
In his first public comments since the Windsor framework was unveiled on Monday, the former prime minister did not explicitly say he would oppose it, and said he hoped the changes would work but that he had serious reservations about the impact.
Making a speech at a commercial summit in London, Johnson also accepted blame for the fact his original plan for Northern Ireland border arrangements did not, as he had promised, avoid checks in the Irish Sea – although he ultimately blamed the EU for this.
He also called on Sunak to not drop a bill, currently going through parliament, would allow the UK to unilaterally change elements of the protocol, arguing this was the best way to win concessions from the EU.
On the Windsor plan, Johnson said: “I’m going to find it very difficult to vote for something like this myself, because I believed that we should have done something different, no matter how much plaster came off the ceiling in Brussels.
“I hope that it will work. And I also hope that if it doesn’t work, we will have the guts to deploy that bill again. Because I’ve no doubt at all, that that was what brought the EU to negotiate seriously.
“In the meantime I will continue to campaign for what I thought of and what I think of as Brexit and the logic of Brexit because this is nothing if it is not a Brexit government. And Brexit is nothing if we in this country don’t do things differently. We need to take advantage of it, and we need to be seen to take advantage.”
The core of Johnson’s speech and subsequent Q&A session was the argument that Brexit was pointless without significant divergence from Brussels orthodoxy, saying the EU feared the UK “actually taking advantage of Brexit freedoms so as to be more competitive”.
It was this fear, Johnson argued, that made the EU interpret his own Northern Ireland plan rigidly, “as a way of keeping us more or less where they wanted”.
“This is all my fault. I accept full responsibility,” he continued. “Beneath the paint and plasters, there was the cold steel reality of EU control. The commission was in charge, not the UK. And contrary to my hopes, they did not apply it sensibly.”
Arguing against Sunak’s revision of the plan, which retains elements of EU legal oversight for goods entering Northern Ireland and bound for the Republic of Ireland, and thus the single market, Johnson said he had always argued “there was no point in being a vassal state, there was no point in being a rule-taker”.
“We must be clear about what is really going on here. This is not about the UK taking back control,” he said. “This is the EU, graciously unbending to allow us to do what we want in our own country, not by our laws, but by theirs.
after newsletter promotion
“In that sense, this deal helps to accomplish the key objective I spoke of, in that it acts as a drag anchor on divergence. And there’s no point in Brexit unless you do things differently.”
While arguing there was no point in the UK “just emulating the high tax, high spend, low-growth European model”, Johnson said he accepted the argument may have moved on from his objectives.
“People wanted to change in their lives. They wanted to see things done differently,” he said. “I’ve got to put my hands up for this as much as anybody. We haven’t done enough yet to convince them that it can deliver the change they want to see.”
Johnson said he wished that as prime minister he had slashed corporation tax to “outbid the Irish”, adding: “What I wish we had done is put a big ‘Invest here’ sign over Britain as soon as we were out of Covid.”
Asked about a potential return to frontline politics, Johnson was typically opaque, saying only he had several books to complete: “I got a big budget of words I have to write, andI’m churning it out.”
