The Tories have recently postponed checks on imports from the EU to the UK for the fifth time, fearing the inevitable effect in raising prices. But those checks are likely to come in 2024.
The Tories have also stalled on wholesale scrapping of environmental and labour safeguards derived from the EU. But that is what they want to do. That, for them, is the whole purpose of Brexit.
The revisions to the Northern Ireland Protocol are only a way to fudge, for a while, the inescapable conflict between wanting a “hard” border between the UK and the EU, yet a “soft” border between Northern Ireland (part of the UK) and Ireland (part of the EU). The conflict will be sharpened as the UK moves away from EU-agreed regulations.
As socialists, we want lower borders. Higher borders between the UK and the EU make extra obstacles to workers’ unity between countries, and among migrant and “local” workers even within countries. That is why we backed Remain in 2016, and why we joined the anti-Brexit marches.
Whatever the dreams about “Lexit” (a left “Brexit”), it hasn’t happened and isn’t going to happen. Opinion surveys show the majority know that the only way out from the Tory-designed Brexit path we’ve been set on is to reverse Brexit, even if most of that majority are for now too beaten-down to think that possible.
Rejoining the European free-movement area, rejoining the Single Market, and rejoining the Customs Union, are still relatively accessible because the Tories have not dared to go far yet with their Brexit plans. Norway is in the free-movement area and (mostly) in the Single Market; Turkey is in a Customs Union with the EU. And we also want to be part of EU-wide democracy, and of a cross-border working-class battle to take EU-wide democracy beyond its present miserable level. So the aim must be to rejoin the EU.