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Parliament in Westminster confirmed the Brexit follow-up deal with a strong majority of 521 to 73 votes, but outside of London the rejection could not have been clearer. Of the three state parliaments, only Wales approved the deal brokered by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, while Scotland and Northern Ireland clearly rejected it. Both had already voted against leaving the EU in the 2016 Brexit referendum. Their current rejection is mainly symbolic in nature, but does not bode well for future negotiations and the unity of the nation.
In Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, head of the country, criticized the agreement that Prime Minister Boris Johnson had presented to his nation as a “little gift” for Christmas. MPs in Edinburgh then voted 92-30 against the deal, which, according to Sturgeon and his Scottish National Party (SNP), offered the country “no advantage, just huge disadvantages.” His party refuses to be complicit in how “grave damage is done to the ecological, economic and social interests of Scotland”.
In addition to the Greens and Liberal Democrats, the Labor Party in Scotland also joined the rejection and received harsh criticism from the rest of the country. Labor leader Keir Starmer had sworn to his party that he would support the deal. After all, this is better than starting the new year without a follow-up agreement.
The leader of the state party, Richard Leonard, defended his rebellion against this labor requirement and also received the support of all parties when he proposed an extension of the law on the Brexit follow-up agreement. Among other things, it calls for an equivalent replacement for the Erasmus exchange program for students, from which Britain is now leaving.
Rare deal in Northern Ireland: find the scapegoat
In Northern Ireland’s capital Belfast, 47 MPs voted against the deal and 38 in favor. MPs, as well as Scots, recalled that their part of the country had voted against leaving the EU from the start and was not prepared to accept its devastating consequences.
There was seldom agreement, at least on the question of who was to blame, between the otherwise opposed pro-Syrian Sinn Féin party and the pro-British unionists of Ulster. Both blamed responsibility for the unfortunate deal on Northern Ireland’s strongest ruling party, the pro-British Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).
As a former coalition partner of the British Conservatives, the DUP had supported the Brexit course, but was subsequently dropped on its terms after the Conservatives achieved their own stable majority. As a result, among other things, Johnson broke his promise that there would be no customs checks between Northern Ireland and the rest of the kingdom, which will be the case from 1 January 2021. Unionists fear they will be cut off from Britain and they will lose importance within the kingdom.
“It’s a shame,” said Mervyn Gibson, general secretary of the pro-British Protestant Orange Order at the Reuters news agency outside his home in Belfast. “We were abandoned and in fact betrayed by the Prime Minister.”
The DUP rejected the culpability of the maritime border in force since January. Rather, pro-Irish parties created this situation by rejecting the alternative to the maritime border: controls at the land border with the Republic of Ireland, the DUP announced. The EU had also rejected a hard land border, which jeopardized peace on the Irish island.
Agreement despite frustration in Cardiff
Wales was the only part of the country, other than England, that passed Brexit in 2016, and it also passed Johnson’s deal with 28 to 24 votes in the current vote. Even there, however, Prime Minister Mark Drakeford spoke of a “thin and disappointing” deal. After all, you can build on the deal and negotiate better contracts for the future, the country manager said.
Labor has a majority in the Welsh Parliament and MPs, unlike their friends in the Scottish Party, joined the Labor party line in support of the deal.
The divided kingdom
In the vote on the Brexit follow-up agreement, state parliaments only had a token handle. However, his rejection of the course of government shows how bad unity is in the kingdom.
In Northern Ireland, for example, the nationalist Sinn Féin increasingly sees Brexit as an opportunity to regain independence from London 100 years after annexation to the UK. “More and more people are wondering what their identity is outside the EU and what Brexit has done to their identity,” said John O’Dowd, a Sinn Féin MP, now in the Northern Ireland Parliament. He pointed to annexation to the Republic of Ireland as a possible solution.
In Scotland, on Christmas Eve, the SNP had announced Britain’s independence and EU membership on Twitter: “We never voted for this extreme deal from the Conservatives.”
The head of government generously denounced the leadership in London: “The system at Westminster can no longer be repaired,” he said in the course of the vote, and Scotland’s opinion had been ignored in London at all times “during this fiasco” . Even before Brexit, his SNP was calling for Scotland to be independent from the UK and if successful, he would like to rejoin the EU as a separate country. “We deserve the best possible treatment, as an independent European country.”
