Das 2022 Northern Ireland Protocol Bill: Chronik eines angekündigten EU/UK Handelskrieges?

Over six years after the UK voted to leave the EU (‘Brexit’) the terms of the Irish/Northern Irish Protocol, centrepiece of the Brexit withdrawal arrangements, are back on the agenda. The present controversy surrounds the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill 2022, originally tabled by the then Foreign Secretary Truss and which, in seeking to sabotage the Protocol, threatens to collapse the withdrawal arrangements and initiate an EU/UK trade war. This article recalls previous UK attempts to resile from the terms of the withdrawal arrangements, assesses the conflicts baked into the UK’s approach to Brexit inter alia with the CJEU, the ECHR and the WTO, and charts the battlefield options open to the parties in the incipient trade war: nuclear (termination); strategic (partial suspension(s)); and conventional (countermeasures and infringement actions). The article asks whether Northern Ireland could be brought into a more European trajectory, what the impact on Scotland will be and whether a Brexit that has failed so comprehensively might one day allow a future English PM to realign London’s relationship with the EU.