Northern Ireland Protocol: Rishi Sunak has so far kept his Brexit talks trump card under wraps – this is what could be in the deal and why it could face trouble ahead
Enemies are circling, Brexiteers are already pronouncing it dead, and the DUP are warning it undermines the Union.
But as opponents line up to try and assassinate Rishi Sunak’s forthcoming deal with Brussels to rework Northern Ireland’s post-Brexit future, Sky News can reveal that Number 10 is yet to play its trump card.
Despite weeks of headlines and column inches about the talks, Downing Street has so far kept under wraps what some believe is perhaps the biggest negotiation win.
Far from giving ground to the EU, they think they have turned the tables and forced a concession.
In short, Westminster will set VAT rates, taxation and state aid policy in Northern Ireland, not Brussels.
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Mr Sunak has made addressing the disparity over VAT a priority ever since his last budget as chancellor, when Northern Ireland could not benefit from his decision to slash the tax on solar panels and other energy efficient purchases elsewhere in the UK because it must follow EU single market rules.
Downing Street is unwilling to reveal any change is coming publicly, insisting that “intensive” negotiations are still under way, giving them nothing yet to announce.
However, Sky News understands that the concession by Brussels is likely to feature at the heart of the reform package.
DUP Leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson
Some MPs have been alerted to the likely inclusion of this change, it is welcomed privately by senior DUP figures, and it is understood to be one of the three major changes at the heart of the Sunak deal with Brussels. The DUP’s only reservation is that they want to see the legal text to check the concession is as described.
It is not clear, however, whether it will be enough.
After months of official negotiations, what some see as basic errors – and an information vacuum – may have allowed too much of a head of steam to build up behind the opposition.
As a result, it is now unclear whether the changes hammered out with Brussels since December will ever be implemented.
Mr Sunak is facing splits amongst key allies over how and whether to proceed, with warnings that he’s not strong enough to face down his party and growing anxiety in Brussels that the first prime minister they have trusted since Brexit may be about to let them down.
The next few days could end up being the most consequential of his premiership.
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‘Collapse of Good Friday Agreement absolute catastrophe’
What is in the forthcoming deal?
The patchwork of measures and agreements to change the Northern Ireland Protocol have been prepared in utmost secrecy.
Taken together, those involved say it required the EU to change its negotiating mandate and agree to alter the text of the Protocol – something Brussels said was not possible during the premierships of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.
Under the Sunak proposals, three key changes to that arrangement are likely to be agreed.
The first has been well trailed: businesses that have signed up to a “trusted trader scheme” will be allowed to avoid all checks when moving goods from the GB mainland to Northern Ireland.
In exchange, the EU will be able to access “real-time” UK data on trade flows across the Irish Sea. The handful of companies who are not signed up to the trusted trader scheme would have to continue labelling and filling in paperwork as at present.
The second – known as the “Stormont Lock”, first mentioned in The Sunday Times – is designed to go some way towards addressing concerns that Northern Ireland will remain subject to EU single market rules under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice as the price of avoiding border checks between the North and the Republic.
Read more:
What are the DUP’s seven tests for changes to the NI Protocol?
Rishi Sunak leaves the Culloden Hotel in Belfast, after holding talks with Stormont leaders last week
It is very complicated, but essentially it will give Northern Ireland some of the rights also enjoyed by Norway – which is also out of the EU but in the single market, so it has a say on the rules being imposed by Brussels.
Under the terms of the proposed deal, the EU will have to give the UK notice of future EU regulations intended for Northern Ireland. The Joint Ministerial Committee will then be able to lodge an objection, which may then result in the EU voluntarily choosing to disapply the regulation in Northern Ireland.
Alternatively, the Speaker of the Stormont Assembly could put the issue to a vote, which could delay when the forthcoming regulation comes into force. If the EU decides to take legal action because of a failure to implement the rule, then a Northern Ireland court would have to rule on the issue first, resulting in further delays.
This movement is likely to be welcomed by some. But this is arguably the biggest area of compromise for Brexiteers and unionists, since it does not give the outright veto on future EU regulations, which is something the DUP want.
The third change is the one revealed at the start of this article: that control of the so-called level playing field of measures, like VAT rates and state subsidy policy, will revert to Westminster. For constitutionalists, this will be seen as an important change.
Almost complete for some time, according to sources, none of this package has been formally briefed to the parties or the public.
Number 10 insists that negotiations are live, but other government sources suggest there is almost no activity still going on, and the principles of the agreement are settled even if there is some haggling on wording still to do.
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PM ‘won’t sell anyone out’
How the deal was done
Mr Sunak came into office wanting to establish a reputation for sorting out problems, particularly the poor relations with the EU and – to a lesser extent the US – over Brexit.
The PM wanted to ensure President Biden turns up in Northern Ireland for the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement this Easter, meaning he needed to do a deal to ensure the Stormont Assembly was back up and running by then.
For this to happen, the PM needed the DUP to agree to a deal on the Protocol, and then go back into powersharing with Sinn Fein in order to form a government.
So, one key objective throughout these negotiations has been for Mr Sunak to get the hardline unionists on board. It was always a tall order, but it was one he chose to attempt. But it is on precisely this issue that Number 10 took an extraordinary – and some think reckless – gamble.
Despite needing the DUP onside, they decided not to talk to them personally. They decided that they did not want them involved in any way in the negotiations or feeding in thoughts, fearing this would make the talks unmanageable, so they were shut out.
Senior DUP sources tell me there were “no backchannels” to try and scope out what they needed, which they said was a contrast even from the Theresa May era.
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Sunak and Starmer clash over Protocol
Instead, the UK negotiating team were told to look up the DUP’s seven tests for a Northern Ireland Protocol replacement – which feature prominently on their website and in speeches by leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson – and find a solution to each one. One insider described it as the “spreadsheet approach” to the issue.
“We assumed that if you solve the problems in the seven tests, the DUP would be on board. That was certainly the presumption all the way along,” said one government source.
Then in an extraordinary moment three weeks ago, government sources started briefing the newspapers that the deal had successfully answered every one of the DUP’s tests, but without offering an explanation of how or why.
This entire approach flabbergasted the DUP. The tests were drawn up 18 months ago, in another political environment. They range from the broad – number four is “Giving NI people a say in their laws” – to the specific, such as number five, which states “No checks on goods between GB/NI”.
Read more:
What do we know about the deal being discussed by the UK and EU?
They were devised after conversations with the Johnson government, and were not designed to have a binary answer. Whether the tests were met was to be judged by the DUP alone.
Yet now the government was briefing journalists that the DUP’s concerns had been soothed, and their objections dealt with, without even telling them how.
“These tests weren’t designed to be used in that way”, said one senior DUP member. “If we’d known they were going to assume this level of importance we would have rewritten them and sharpened them”, they said.
Meanwhile, the DUP baulking at the tests has caused huge anger in government. Privately, some accuse the party of game playing and moving the goal posts. The DUP retort that if the goal was to get them on side, they should have opened a dialogue with them in person.
This move worsened the politics, although both sides also acknowledge that however badly Number 10 may have handled this, there was perhaps no deal ever to be made that satisfied both the DUP and the EU.
The trouble is, Downing Street only now appears to be grappling with this outcome afresh, with Brexiteers rowing in behind the DUP to make clear they are going to oppose the deal outlined.
So what next?
It is unclear how the prime minister will proceed. He has three options: press ahead, fully renegotiate or abandon his plan.
If he presses forward in the face of DUP and ERG opposition, he could face trench warfare in the Commons, whether or not any deal is put to a vote.
Mr Sunak would try to become the first Tory PM since 2010 to take on the Eurosceptics and not lose – as David Cameron did ultimately in 2016, then Theresa May did in 2019.
Alternatively, Mr Sunak could fully resume the negotiations, which despite the rhetoric, are mostly on pause at the moment.
However, the EU is unlikely to give more, and cannot bow to the DUP demand that Northern Ireland is no longer bound by future EU rules – for fear of destabilising member states and Norway, which is also in the single market but not the EU.
Or Mr Sunak could abandon the reforms, which would make clear the limits of his power and raise questions about whether he was running a “zombie” regime locked in coalition with truculent and weary Tory MPs.
If he does not do a deal, he will also have to decide whether to press ahead with the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, which would give the UK government unilateral power to rip up the Northern Ireland section of the original Brexit treaty.
Rishi Sunak speaks during PMQs
Sky News understands that this is facing 90 amendments in the House of Lords, meaning that it is all but impossible to get through without resorting to the Parliament Act – the legislative nuclear option to override a veto by peers.
It is understood the PM is arguing against this in sessions with MPs, suggesting that a bitter parliamentary fight over the passage of the bill would reduce leverage with the EU rather than increase it as the ERG claim.
Mr Sunak has no easy options.
Once he is done with this, the next fight will be over legislation on migration, which some Tories believe will fail unless it goes further than is permitted by the European Convention on Human Rights – something that would enrage the EU all over again. The parade of Tory MPs raising this issue today in PMQs alone made clear the scale of the fight on that.
Meanwhile, within weeks, the privileges committee inquiry into whether former PM Boris Johnson lied at the despatch box will begin, with televised hearings raking over the wounds of one of the most painful episodes of recent Tory history.
The prime minister may have calmed things down, but there are toxic challenges ahead. Can he prove he’s not running a lame duck administration, or will it get worse?
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The presumption in Westminster is the next general election will take place in the back half of next year.
But it only takes 37 Tory MPs to defy the PM and vote in a confidence vote alongside the opposition to trigger an election. Could things get that heated?
World
Video emerges of aid workers being fired on in Gaza – contradicting Israeli account of deadly attack
Footage has emerged of the moment 15 aid workers were killed in Gaza last month – showing their ambulances and fire insignia were clearly visible when Israeli troops are believed to have opened fire on them.
The bodies of 15 aid workers – eight medics working for the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), six civil defence members, and one United Nations employee – were found in a “mass grave” after the incident, according to the head of the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Jonathan Whittall.
The Israeli military said it is investigating – claiming before the video came to light that its initial inquiry found its troops opened fire on vehicles without headlights or emergency signals, which therefore looked “suspicious”. It also says there was an evacuation order in place in the area at the time of the incident.
But video footage obtained by the PRCS – and verified by Sky News – shows ambulances and a fire vehicle clearly marked with flashing red lights.
Vehicles are seen with red flashing lights in the footage
Sky News has used aftermath video and satellite imagery to verify the location and timing of the footage.
It was filmed on 23 March north of Rafah. It shows a convoy of marked ambulances and a fire-fighting vehicle travelling south along a road towards central Rafah. All of the vehicles visible in the convoy have their flashing lights on.
It was filmed early in the morning, with a satellite image seen by Sky News taken at 9.48am local time on the same day showing a group of vehicles bunched together off the road.
The PRCS first posted about losing contact with its crews just before 7am local time.
Satellite imagery shows the area on 26 March, three days later. Tyre tracks are visible, as are groundworks likely created by military vehicles.
Pic: Planet Labs PBC
The footage is first filmed from inside a moving vehicle, through the windscreen a convoy of vehicles is visible – including ambulances and a fire truck with flashing emergency signal lights.
When the convoy stops, a vehicle is seen having veered off the road to the left-hand side.
The vehicle where the video is being filmed from stops and the aid workers get out. Intense gunfire then breaks out and continues for around five minutes.
The paramedic filming the video is heard saying in Arabic that there are Israelis present – and reciting a declaration of faith used before someone dies.
Hebrew voices are also heard in the background but it is not clear what they are saying.
The footage was filmed from a moving vehicle
Israel conducting ‘thorough examination’
In a fresh statement on Saturday, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said the incident is “under thorough examination”.
“All claims, including the documentation circulating about the incident, will be thoroughly and deeply examined to understand the sequence of events and the handling of the situation,” it added.
In its statement on Saturday, the PCRS said the clip was “found on the phone of martyred EMT Rif’at Radwan, after his body was recovered” and that it “clearly shows that the ambulances and fire trucks they were using were visibly marked, with flashing emergency lights on at the time they were attacked”.
“This video unequivocally refutes the occupation’s claims that Israeli forces did not randomly target ambulances, and that some vehicles had approached ‘suspiciously without lights or emergency markings’,” it added.
‘They should have been protected’
Speaking at the United Nations on Friday, PRCS president Dr Younis Al Khatib said the organisation has “asked for an independent investigation”.
He added: “Something I can release, I heard the voice of one of those kids. I heard the voice of one of those team members who was killed and his phone was found with his body and he recorded the whole event.
“His last words before being shot, ‘Forgive me, mom. I just wanted to help people. I wanted to save lives’.”
Pic: Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS)
Dylan Winder, permanent observer of the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) said it is “outraged at the deaths of eight medics from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society killed on duty in Gaza“.
“They were humanitarians. They wore emblems that should have been protected. Their ambulances were clearly marked, and they should have returned to their families. They did not,” he said.
“Even in the most complex conflict zones, there are rules. These rules of international humanitarian law could not be clearer: civilians must be protected, humanitarians must be protected, health services must be protected.”
In a statement issued before the footage of the incident emerged, the IDF said it condemned “the repeated use of civilian infrastructure by the terrorist organisations in the Gaza Strip, including the use of medical facilities and ambulances for terrorist purposes”.
It claimed that several members of the militant groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad were killed in the incident.
It did not comment directly on the deaths of the Red Crescent workers but later told the Reuters news agency it had allowed the bodies to be recovered from the area, which it described as an active combat zone.
Fifteen people died in the incident on 23 March
Bodies found in ‘mass grave’
The bodies of the missing aid workers were found in sand in the south of the Gaza Strip in what Mr Whittall, called a “mass grave”, marked with the emergency light from a crushed ambulance.
He posted pictures and video of Red Crescent teams digging in the sand for the bodies and workers laying them out on the ground, covered in plastic sheets.
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Bodies of aid workers found in Gaza
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), said that the bodies had been “discarded in shallow graves” in what he called “a profound violation of human dignity”.
According to the UN, at least 1,060 healthcare workers have been killed in the 18 months since Israel launched its offensive in Gaza after Hamas fighters stormed southern Israel on 7 October 2023.
The UN is reducing its international staff in Gaza by a third because of safety concerns.
Palestinian health authorities say more than 50,000 people have been killed since Israel launched its campaign in Gaza in response to the 7 October assault, when Hamas militants crossed the border into southern Israel, killing more than 1,200 people, and taking some 250 hostage.
Gaza’s health ministry records do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Gaza’s health ministry has removed 1,852 people from its official list of war fatalities since October, after finding that some had died of natural causes or were alive but had been imprisoned.
The list of deaths currently stands at 50,609 following the removals. Gaza’s health ministry records do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Almost all of the names removed (97%) had initially been submitted through an online form which allows families to record the deaths of loved ones where the body is missing.
The head of the statistics team at Gaza’s health ministry, Zaher Al Wahidi, told Sky News that names submitted via the form had been removed as a precautionary measure pending a judicial investigation into each one.
“We realised that a lot of people [submitted via the form] died a natural death,” Mr Wahidi said. “Maybe they were near an explosion and they had a heart attack, or [living in destroyed] houses caused them pneumonia or hypothermia. All these cases we don’t [attribute to] the war.”
Others submitted via the form were found to be imprisoned or to be missing with insufficient evidence that they had died.
Some families submitting false claims, Mr Wahidi said, may have been motivated by the promise of government financial assistance.
It is the largest removal of names from the list since the war began, and comes after 1,441 names were removed between August and October – 54% of them originating in hospital morgue records rather than the online form.
Mr Wahidi says his team audited the hospital data after receiving complaints from people who had ended up on the list despite being alive.
They found that hospital clerks, when operating without access to the central population registry and lacking full names or dates of birth for the dead, had marked the wrong people as dead in their records.
In total, 8% of people who were listed as dead in August have since been removed from the official death toll. Many of those may later be added back in, as the judicial investigations proceed.
‘It doesn’t look like manipulation’
Gabriel Epstein, a research assistant at US thinktank The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said there’s no reason to think the errors are the result of deliberate manipulation intended to inflate the share of women and children among the dead.
“If 90% of the removed entries were men aged 18-40, that would look like manipulation,” he said. “But it doesn’t look like that.”
Of those entries removed since the start of the war and whose demographic information was recorded, 41% are men aged 18 to 60, while 59% are women, children and elderly people.
By comparison, 44% of remaining deaths are working-age men. This means that the removals have had the effect of slightly reducing the share of women and children in the official list.
Names were previously added to the list without verification
Until October, Mr Wahidi said, names submitted via the online form had been added to the official list of registered deaths before undergoing a judicial confirmation process.
The publication of unverified deaths submitted via the form had previously led to issues with the data, with 1,295 deaths submitted via the form being removed from the list prior to October. This included 474 people who were later added back again.
Sky News previously understood that names from the form were only published after undergoing judicial confirmation. However, Mr Wahidi says this practice only began in October.
“This does cause me to downgrade the quality of the earlier lists, definitely below where I thought they were,” said Professor Michael Spagat, chair of Every Casualty Counts, an independent civilian casualty monitoring organisation.
Read more:
Analysis: Gaza aid workers’ deaths
What happened to the ceasefire?
A Ministry of Health document from July 2024 confirms that names submitted through the online form were, at the time, included in the official fatality list before being verified.
These names “are initially included in the final count of martyrs, but verification procedures are undertaken afterward”, the document says.
“They basically said that they were posting these things provisionally pending investigation,” said Prof Spagat.
“There may have been literally zero people, including us, who actually absorbed this message, but they weren’t hiding it either.”
More than 1,200 Israelis have been killed in the 7 October attack and ensuing war.
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
World
Global markets have given Trump a clear no-confidence vote – and his fickleness is making the problem worse
Global financial markets gave a clear vote of no-confidence in President Trump’s economic policy.
The damage it will do is obvious: costs for companies will rise, hitting their earnings.
The consequences will ripple throughout the global economy, with economists now raising their expectations for a recession, not only in the US, but across the world.
Tariffs latest: FTSE 100 suffers biggest daily drop since COVID
Financial investors had been gradually re-calibrating their expectations of Donald Trump over the past few months.
Hopes that his actions may not match his rhetoric were dashed on Wednesday as he imposed sweeping tariffs on the US’ trading partners, ratcheting up protectionism to a level not seen in more than a century.
On Wednesday, Donald Trump announced global tariffs, ratcheting up protectionism. Pic: Reuters
Traders at the Frankfurt stock exchange watched the DAX plummet on Friday. Pic: Picture-alliance/dpa/AP
Markets were always going to respond to that but they are also battling with another problem: the lack of certainty when it comes to Trump.
He is a capricious figure and we can only guess his next move. Will he row back? How far is he willing to negotiate and offer concessions?
Read more:
No winners from Trump’s tariff gameshow
Trade war sparks ‘$2.2trn’ global sell-off
These are massive unknowns, which are piled on to uncertainty about how countries will respond.
China has already retaliated and Europe has indicated it will go further.
Vehicles destined for export, like these in Yantai in eastern China, face massive US tariffs. Pic: Chinatopix/AP
Container ports like Oakland in California might expect activity to fall. Pic: AP
That will compound the problems for the global economy and undoubtedly send shivers through the markets.
Much is yet to be determined, but if there’s one thing markets hate, it’s uncertainty.
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