Monthly Archives: July 2021

1. The EU Needs a Policy to Turn Post-Brexit UK into a Good Neighbor  Bloomberg
2. UK rejects EUs Northern Ireland moves, saying Brexit deal must be renegotiated  The Guardian
3. Brexit: EU publishes proposals to simplify NI Protocol  BBC News
4. Brexit: Boris Johnson slammed over trade deals and Northern Ireland protocol  The Scotsman
5. Brexit LIVE: Boris throws away new EU proposals orders withdrawal agreement be reopened  Daily Express
6. View Full Coverage on Google News

Go here to see the original:

The EU Needs a Policy to Turn Post-Brexit UK into a Good Neighbor - Bloomberg

LONDON, July 22 (Reuters) - British Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said on Thursday the European Union had been inflexible over renegotiating the Northern Ireland part of the Brexit divorce accord and cautioned Brussels that it was not a deal that would last for ever.

"A deal is a deal but it wasn't something that was going to last forever," Kwarteng told Sky. "It was something that was flexible and we want to make it work more smoothly."

"Article 16 ... it is something that we could do, to suspend it, we've chosen not to do that, that's not our opening position and we want to be able to negotiate and have a conversation with the EU about how best to go forward."

Britain demanded on Wednesday that the EU agree to rewrite the Northern Ireland protocol which covers post-Brexit trade involving the province just a year after it was agreed.

The EU immediately rejected that call, saying Britain needed to respect its international obligations and pointed out it had been negotiated by Prime Minister Boris Johnson. read more

The protocol was a key part of the Brexit settlement, backed by Johnson, that finally sealed Britain's divorce from the EU four years after voters backed leaving in a referendum.

Businesses in Northern Ireland say it is damaging trade, and some pro-British groups have protested at what they say is a weakening of ties with Britain, raising concerns about a return to the violence which plagued the province for three decades.

The protocol addresses the biggest conundrum of the divorce: how to ensure the delicate peace brought to the province by a U.S.-brokered 1998 peace accord - by maintaining an open border - without opening a back door through neighbouring Ireland to the EU's single market of 450 million people.

Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge and Kate Holton; editing by Michael Holden

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Continued here:

Britain tells EU on Brexit deal: it wasn't going to last forever - Reuters UK

Brexit is prompting companies to ask themselves many legal questions. One of them is the fate of jurisdiction clauses.

You are a professional and party to a contract where one party is British and the other is a member of the European Union ("EU"). The contract contains a jurisdiction clause.

You are aware that the United Kingdoms withdrawal from the EU prevents the application of the Brussels I bis Regulation1 to your contract after January 1, 2021, and you wonder whether your jurisdiction clause remains effective.

The answer is twofold:

The table below shows whether the Convention applies to your clause and what the consequences are.

There is a jurisdiction clause in a contract between a UK party and a party domiciled in a EU member state: how effective is this clause after January 1, 2021?

In order to determine which regime is applicable to your jurisdiction clause, you should pay particular attention to the following key elements:

States parties to the 2005 Hague Convention: EU member states, Mexico, Montenegro, Singapore and the United Kingdom (whose application to join as an autonomous country dates back to September 28, 2020).

Professional: The Convention does not apply when one of the parties is a natural person acting primarily for personal, family or household purposes.

Exclusivity: The clause is exclusive when it designates the jurisdictions of a single state party.

Unilateral clause: when the clause applies to only one of the parties. These clauses are excluded from the scope of the Convention.

Asymmetrical clause: where the clause provides that one party may bring proceedings in more courts than the other. These clauses are excluded from the scope of the Convention.

Excluded matters: Article 2 of the Convention (link) excludes from its scope about 20 subject matters. We invite you to check that your dispute does not concern an excluded matter.

Exequatur: refers to the judicial procedure allowing a foreign judgment to be enforceable in France.When the judgement is issued is a state party which is also a EU member state, the judgement can be enforced in France without going through an exequatur procedure. When the judgement is issued in a state which is not a EU member state, the judgement can only be enforced in France after an exequatur procedure.

As a reminder, the clauses excluded from the Hague Convention regime will be examined according to the domestic laws of the seized court.

In conclusion, as it stands, it is the Hague Convention (or the domestic laws of the seized court) that is used to determine the validity of the jurisdiction clause. But this may change.

The 2007 Lugano Convention3 allows for the application of a regime identical to that of the Brussels I bis Regulation between the EU and the signatory states (i.e. for the time being, the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), which includes Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland).

The United Kingdom applied to join the Lugano Convention on April 8, 2020. Its accession is conditional upon the unanimous consent of all member states, and the EU has not yet consented (Client alert of April 19, 2021).

The Lugano Convention guarantees, among other things, that decisions rendered in one of its contracting states are recognized in the other contracting states, without the need to resort to any exequatur procedure4. For now, the enforcement of foreign judgments in the UK is governed by UK law.

In the meantime, one must remain cautious.

Original post:

The fate of post-Brexit jurisdiction clauses - JD Supra

He did not want to die until Brexit was reversed. These words were spoken at the funeral last week of my dear friend and former Observer colleague Dick Leonard.

Dick died a month ago at the ripe old age of 90. The speaker was his widow, Irne Heidelberger-Leonard, before a group of mourners who included the Labour leader Keir Starmer, to whom Dick had been something of a political mentor.

Dicks devotion to the European cause was such that he jeopardised his political career he was parliamentary private secretary to the Labour cabinet minister Anthony Crosland from 1970 to 1974 when he joined 68 other Labour rebels, led by Roy Jenkins, in voting in 1971 in favour of joining the European community, against Labour policy at the time. Yes, Labours attitude towards what is now the EU has always been a rollercoaster ride, and here we go again, with prominent Labour politicians lamely accepting a Brexit that is manifestly a disaster and needs to be reversed.

Why, even that prominent culprit and architect of the lying Leave campaign appeared to be having second thoughts about it all in his BBC Two interview last week. Is Brexit a good idea? No one on Earth knows, averred the shameless Dominic Cummings. Indeed, said the prime ministers former best friend, it was perhaps perfectly reasonable to say Brexit was a mistake.

Ill say it is perfectly reasonable. Many of us here on Earth know that only too well. But Cummings almost indicating that in delivering Brexit for Johnson he was merely acting in the capacity of a hired mercenary also told us that anyone convinced that Brexit was a good thing must have a screw loose.

The media are now replete daily with disaster stories. The Northern Ireland protocol is unworkable. The egregious Brexit minister Lord Frost makes this country a laughing stock every time he says the deal that the UK signed up to for the short-term political convenience of Johnson should be renegotiated on the grounds that the EU is being wait for it unreasonable! He calls to mind the Groucho Marx quip: These are my principles. And if you dont like them well, I have others.

One begins to wonder whether Cummings now thinks that, on top of all the other well-publicised prime ministerial gaffes, the chaos of Brexit may contribute to Johnsons downfall a significant signpost being the way freedom day on 19 July swiftly turned into fiasco day in the same week that the Northern Ireland crisis became wholly manifest. In the former case it did not need footballers to embarrass the government: just the chief executive of Marks & Spencer.

But back to my late friend Dick Leonard, with whom I often worked covering European matters when he was based in Brussels. Many of the problems brought about by the Brexiters might have been avoided if they had consulted the invaluable guides to the EU he jointly wrote for the Economist and later the publishers Routledge. In the 2016 edition of The Routledge Guide to the European Union, the authors Dick and another EU expert, Robert Taylor observed of the impending UK referendum: Not everybody would accept that it would be a win-win situation for both Britain and the EU if voters choose to remain, but it will assuredly be a lose-lose one if they decide to quit.

If the Brexiters had consulted the guide, they could have discovered what the customs union and the single market actually were, and what making the crass decision to abandon the hard-won privileges of membership would entail (privileges won, in the case of the single market, not least by their ostensible political heroine Margaret Thatcher). It beggars belief that, after the deed was done and the cabinet Brexiters were faced with reality, they had to have both institutions explained to them by our former ambassador to the EU, Sir Ivan Rogers.

Alas, as that astute observer Denis MacShane a former Labour minister for Europe recently pointed out, Johnson needs a permanent war with the EU to prove that the Battle of Brexit is not over. This in the name of a country that went to war in 1939 to save Europe, and whose prime minister, Winston Churchill, even proposed, in 1940, what would have in effect been a political union of the UK and France.

Above all, says MacShane who probably coined the term Brexit and certainly forecast the result of the referendum Johnson wants the main opposition, Labour, to say nothing about Brexit.

But the time has assuredly come, and those words of our friend Dick Leonards widow he did not want to die until Brexit was reversed will, I hope, stiffen Starmers resolve.

Original post:

Labour must say it out loud: Brexit needs to be reversed - The Guardian

Edward Attenborough and Charles Balmain of White & Case consider what impact the UK leaving the Europ...

Edward Attenborough and Charles Balmain of White & Case consider what impact the UK leaving the European Union will have on Englands place in the dispute resolution market.

The United Kingdoms vote to leave the European Union on 23 June 2016 inevitably heralded speculation around the implications for all manner of industries, not least the UKs successful legal market for commercial disputes.

The received wisdom at the time was that Brexit would do little or nothing to detract from the benefits of English law as a choice to govern international commercial contracts. Some commentators even considered Brexit a positive development, as it would remove the contamination of European law from English law. On the other hand, there was uncertainty around the impact of the loss of the Brussels regime for cross-border cooperation in civil proceedings and the recognition and enforcement of court judgments, both in terms of what if anything would replace it, and whether this may cause commercial parties to reconsider their use of the English courts.

This article takes stock of the situation five years after the Brexit vote, and more than half a year after the end of the Brexit transition period. It addresses the effects of Brexit on the landscape for conflicts of laws issues, and then considers whether these have led to any apparent change in the size or nature of the disputes market in England. The implications of Brexit for investor-state disputes a rich topic of itself is beyond the scope of this article.

There is little reason for commercial parties to reconsider their preference for English law, English-seated arbitrations or for the most part English courts, and little evidence that they are in fact doing so. Indeed, the international disputes market in England is booming. While the nature and style of disputes continues to evolve a process accelerated in some respects by the Covid-19 pandemic and while London faces ever-increasing competition from other jurisdictions, there is little to suggest that the evolution has been driven by Brexit. Nor does Brexit appear to have caused any significant change in market perception of Englands benefits as a forum for resolving cross-border disputes, at least for now.

To gauge the impact of Brexit on Englands appeal as a forum for international disputes, we first consider what Brexit has changed, and not changed, in the relevant legal framework.

First, the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 avoided a cliff-edge revocation of all European law from English law. It provides for all EU legislation which applied directly or indirectly to the UK as at 31 December 2020 to be retained in UK law as retained EU legislation. This avoided uncertainty and potential confusion from the impact of Brexit on substantive English law. English laws divergence from existing European law will therefore be gradual and deliberate. And the impact of European law on English commercial contract law is limited in any case. The commonly cited benefits of English law, such as its promotion of freedom of contract and commercial certainty, are rooted in English common law, and have little to do with European law.

Secondly, the regime for determining the governing law for contractual and non-contractual obligations is essentially unchanged from the position pre-Brexit.

The Law Applicable to Contractual Obligations and Non-Contractual Obligations (Amendment etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019 ensured that the relevant European law instruments, the Rome I and Rome II Regulations, continue to apply in the UK to determine the law applicable to a contract and to parties non-contractual obligations. The Rome Regulations require the parties choice of law to be upheld, subject only to limited exceptions. Rome I and Rome II also require parties agreed choice of law to be upheld in EU Member State courts regardless of whether their chosen law is the law of a Member State. So Member State courts too should continue to uphold English choice of law clauses in contracts.

Thirdly, however, the framework for choice of court jurisdiction and the cross-border recognition and enforcement of court judgments has changed as a result of Brexit.

The Brussels I Recast Regulation, which is the EU instrument that harmonises court jurisdiction issues and enforcement of judgments within the EU, essentially precludes a race to judgment between two EU jurisdictions, upholds parties choice of forum and makes the recognition and enforcement of a judgment of an EU Member State court close to automatic across the EU. But it applies only to the proceedings and judgments of the courts of Member States. Now that the UK has ceased to be a Member State, the Brussels Regulation has no application to the English courts or their judgments. It has been specifically revoked in the UK.

The UK has partially filled this void by acceding to the Hague Convention on Choice of Court Agreements 2005. Although the Hague Convention is yet to enjoy wide international take up, it entered into force in all EU Member States in 2015. The UK acceded to the Convention in its own right immediately after the end of the Brexit transition period, on 1 January 2021. The Hague Convention upholds choice of court agreements in contracting states by requiring the court of any contracting state other than that for which the parties contracted to suspend or dismiss proceedings brought contrary to the parties agreement. It also provides for the straightforward recognition and enforcement of judgments across contracting states.

However, the Hague Convention is not as comprehensive or well tested an instrument as the Brussels Regulation. In particular, it applies only to exclusive jurisdiction agreements. Although not entirely clear, this likely means that an optional disputes clause that allows either party a choice in where to bring proceedings as is commonly negotiated, for example, by banks in financing agreements would not qualify for the protections of the Hague Convention.

Although the UK has meanwhile applied to accede to the Lugano Convention, which broadly mirrors the Brussels Regulation, the consent of all signatory states is required for the UK to do so. All EU Member States and European Free Trade Association (EFTA) states are party to the Lugano Convention. And while the EFTA states have confirmed their support for the UKs accession, the EU Commission has recommended that the UKs application be rejected. It remains to be seen whether the EU27 will share this view.

Finally, Brexit has not changed the cross-border framework relating to arbitration. In particular, the recognition and enforcement of arbitral awards will continue to be subject to the 1958 New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards, to which all EU Member States (and the UK) are party. Indeed, the most significant likely impact of Brexit on arbitration in England is the potential return of the English courts jurisdiction to issue anti-suit injunctions in support of arbitration. The English courts are generally willing to injunct parties from bringing or continuing proceedings brought in breach of an agreement to arbitrate, but were previously precluded from doing so in relation to proceedings brought or threatened in EU Members States following the ECJs decision in the West Tankers case. The West Tankers line of case law, however, is a consequence of the ECJs interpretation of the Brussels Regulation. It is difficult to see why in principle the English courts should refuse to grant an anti-suit to restrain proceedings in an EU Member State court now that the Brussels Regulation no longer applies in the UK (and assuming it is not replaced by the Lugano Convention).

There is no obvious and direct reason why Brexit should discourage commercial parties from using English law. Nor is there any good Brexit-related reason to avoid English-seated arbitration. Indeed, English-seated arbitration has arguably become more attractive as a result of Brexit, for instance due to the potentially increased availability of anti-suit injunctions from the English courts.

As for the choice of English courts, any concern due to the loss of the Brussels Regulation will often prove to be more theoretical than real. The concern arises particularly where a counterparts assets are predominantly located in the EU, such that a party will have in mind whether or not, in the future, it will be possible to enforce an English court judgment against those assets. Frequently, contracting parties will be able to obtain comfort that the Member States relevant to a particular transaction will still enforce English judgments (and respect the parties choice of forum) straightforwardly under their own local rules. And the Hague Convention also provides a replacement solution that many commercial parties should find sufficient for their contracts going forward. Asymmetrical optional jurisdictional clauses may not attract the protections of the Hague Convention, but they also remain attractive as they keep all options on the table for likely claimants: if enforcement is a concern when a dispute arises, the party benefiting from the optionality in the disputes clause retains the ability (depending on the terms of the clause) to arbitrate or litigate elsewhere and so to take any necessary steps at that stage to avoid any potential enforcement issue that may arise from suing in England.

The available recent data regarding London commercial disputes tends to confirm that commercial parties have not been deterred by Brexit and continue to choose England as a forum for the litigation and arbitration of commercial disputes.

The available statistics for the caseload of the English Commercial Court do not suggest any meaningful move away from the English courts by commercial parties. On the contrary, the Portland Report on Commercial Courts for April 2020 to March 2021 found that the courts had had a record caseload. While the proportion of EU-based litigants using the Commercial Courts has declined somewhat (from 13.5% at the last count before the Brexit vote for 2015-2016 to 11.5% in the most recent report), it remains significant. Indeed, despite the proportional drop, the total number of EU-based litigants using the Commercial Courts has increased. So, the most that can be said based on the statistics is that the growth in use of the Commercial Court is not as great among parties from the EU as those from other regions.

Meanwhile, the major European arbitral institutions, particularly the International Chamber of Commerce International Court of Arbitration (ICC) and the London Court of International Arbitration (LCIA), show an overall trend towards increased numbers of English-seated arbitrations. So, the ICC (a Paris-headquartered institution) registered 114 London-seated arbitrations in 2019, compared with 57 in 2015. The LCIA had more English-seated arbitrations in 2020 (342) than its entire caseload in 2015. And it is clear from both institutions statistics that the arbitrating parties are predominantly international, with UK parties constituting a relatively small minority.

These figures reflect market sentiment. The 2021 Queen Mary University of London/White & Case International Arbitration Survey confirmed that London remained the most popular seat of arbitration (equal with Singapore) among survey respondents, cited by 54% as a preferred seat. Although this represented a slight decrease from the equivalent figure in 2018 (64%), the decrease did not come at the expense of EU Member State seats such as Paris and Geneva (whose election was also slightly down from 2018) but rather the increased popularity of Hong Kong and Singapore. And London was still chosen by a higher proportion of survey respondents than it was in the last such survey before the Brexit vote in 2015 (47%).

Meanwhile, transactional lawyers in London offices of international law firms are, anecdotally (and as suggested by recent financial announcements of some firms) very busy. The English law transactions of today are the disputes of tomorrow, and there is no obvious sign here of any flight from English law or English dispute resolution fora.

Undoubtedly, Englands place in the international disputes market is evolving and will continue to evolve. The Covid-19 pandemic may have accelerated a trend towards more remote hearings and greater use of technology in disputes generally, for example. Meanwhile, economic trends such as the growing focus on green industries and technologies will inevitably alter the shape of the disputes market as well as the wider economy. These developments are not, though, obviously related to Brexit. From the authors personal experience, while commercial parties have certainly been concerned to understand the implications of Brexit for their choice of dispute resolution forum and the governing law of their contracts, few have changed their approach as a result (and those that do either wish to ensure the protection of the Hague Convention or have the leverage to secure an asymmetric jurisdiction clause in their favour, rather than move their disputes to a different jurisdiction altogether).

Brexit is of course still in its infancy. The message from the statistics currently available may be one of instant reassurance both for lawyers and commercial parties who chose to resolve their disputes in England. But it is not a call for complacency. Parties and their lawyers will need to remain astute to legal developments in all relevant jurisdictions and to assessing their needs for the particular circumstances at hand. In doing so, English law, and Englands legal institutions, judiciary, arbitrators and practitioners, will best continue to serve their international users, and retain their trust.

Edward Attenborough and Charles Balmain are dispute resolution partners with White & Case in London

The authors would like to thanks Arthur Lauvaux (associate, White & Case) for his assistance in preparing this article

Any views expressed in this publication are strictly those of the authors and should not be attributed in any way to White & Case LLP

CDR Spring 2019

Subscribe now and access all of CDR's daily news and analysis, complete with a full archive of all articles and PDF back issues of CDR magazine.

Read more:

A false dusk? The outlook for disputes in the UK post-Brexit - ICLG.com

Can you ask Barclays why it refuses to hand over the balance of my mothers bank account which it insisted she close after 40 years? She is 83 and lives in Italy. She was told last September that the bank was closing her account on 28 December because of Brexit. I understand she is one of a number of people who live in Europe and have had their UK accounts similarly closed.

All of her attempts to get her 4,000 balance back have so far failed. Barclays sent her an online registration last autumn, but failed to send her a password to allow her to access the account before it was closed. She has since asked for the money to be paid into her Italian account, but it never seems to happen.

We have called so many times trying to resolve this, and complied with all requests. I even sent the required documentation to the UK via DHL and asked a friend to deliver them by hand to Barclays, but it had no effect.

My mother cannot travel to the UK to retrieve the money, and we despair of ever seeing it again.

PL, Italy

UK banks shutting accounts for customers who live in Europe has been one of the unforeseen outcomes of Brexit, and a major headache for all of those affected.

To give your mother, who did not bank online, such a short period to close the account was hardly helpful, and Barclays has most definitely not covered itself in glory in your subsequent dealings with it.

I suspect her documents were stuck in a backlog of post at the bank, built up as staff worked from home. This is a problem that has affected many firms over the past 18 months.

After I raised the case, Barclays did, at least, move quickly to resolve the problem, and your mothers money was paid into her Italian bank account a few days later.

Barclays has since apologised sincerely for the delays. It says it needed the documents to establish her identity, as the protection of our customers funds and data is one of our highest priorities.

We welcome letters but cannot answer individually. Email us at consumer.champions@theguardian.com or write to Consumer Champions, Money, the Guardian, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Please include a daytime phone number. Submission and publication of all letters is subject to our terms and conditions

See the original post:

Barclays refuses to hand over 4,000 after Brexit account closure - The Guardian

Jonathan Evershed and Mary C. Murphy examine how Sinn Fin responded to Brexit. They argue that its pursuit of Special Status for Northern Ireland represented an attempt to mitigate Brexits risks, rather than to leverage its opportunities. This approach came with political costs for the party, whose recent electoral surge has arguably been in spite of rather than because of it.

On 31 January 2020, during a speech to the Institute of International and European Affairs in Dublin, Sinn Fin Party President, Mary Lou McDonald, described Brexit as the opportunity of a lifetime to complete the Republican project of Irish (re)unification. The speech came in the midst of a dramatic and transformative general election campaign, which would eventually see Sinn Fin returned to the Dil with 37 members of parliament just one less than the largest party, Fianna Fil and, for the first time, the highest share of first preference votes in an Irish general election.

Sinn Fin is now the lead party of opposition in the Republic of Ireland, and it is a prevailing assumption within and beyond Leinster House that it will enter government following the next general election, to be held no later than 2025. It is already a party of government in Northern Ireland. And with the DUP floundering following the denouement of its confidence and supply relationship with the Conservative Party and the imposition of a new border in the Irish Sea, current polling suggests that Sinn Fin could well be returned as the largest party in the Assembly when Northern Irish voters go to the polls next year. Concurrently, in the wake of Brexit, support for Irish unity is polling at all-time highs in Northern Ireland (albeit that such polls must always be taken with a pinch of salt, and that across them, Northern Irelands remaining part of the UK emerges more-or-less consistently as the preference of a majority).

Including by destabilising the UKs territorial constitution, Brexit has presaged a step-change in the tempo and tenor of discussions about a referendum on Irish unity, which the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland is mandated by the Good Friday Agreement to call if it appears likely that a majority in Northern Ireland is liable to favour unification. The new urgency of these constitutional conversations has given rise to a number of recent academic projects, which have sought to bring a degree of clarity to what is at stake in any post-Brexit border poll. To put it plainly, Brexit has made a united Ireland though far from inevitable, and, according to some polls, only at the margins an increasingly immediate and concrete proposition. As the form that Brexit has (both potentially and actually) taken since 2016 has increasingly hardened, this has become ever more the case.

On the face of it, despite Sinn Fins having campaigned against Brexit, it has nonetheless left the party in a position of political strength unprecedented in its history, and its primary policy goal of Irish unity closer than at any time since Ireland was partitioned 100 years ago. Indeed, some of its most vocal critics have, sometimes to the point of farce, sought to characterise Sinn Fin as having actually favoured and even pursued a hard or no-deal Brexit. That Englands difficulty is Irelands opportunity is certainly a long-running rhetorical trend in Irish Republican politics, and there is some suggestion that this may have had a degree of influence on the vigour of Sinn Fins campaign and the voting behaviour of its supporters during the Brexit referendum in 2016.

However, far from having viewed Brexit as a wedge issue, to be leveraged in the pursuit of constitutional transformation, we have found that it has instead been overwhelmingly viewed within Sinn Fin as a threat to be managed. Especially in its potential to disrupt the openness of the Irish border, Brexit has represented grave political, economic, social and existential risks, which have been most acutely felt by nationalist voters in sections of Sinn Fins core constituency, including in the border counties and multiply deprived communities in Belfast and Derry. Throughout the Brexit process between 2016 and 2019, the party was principally concerned with contesting Brexit policy rather than with using Brexit as an opportunity for polity contestation. As one former Sinn Fin MLA neatly summarised:

We are in this dilemma that actually the harder Brexit is, I suspect, the more support there will be for a United Ireland. But despite that, we are trying to mitigate or ameliorate the worst aspects of Brexit.

Sinn Fins approach on Brexit has been framed by its policy of Designated Special Status within the EU for the North of Ireland, which it sought to promote in Brussels through a diplomatic offensive, spear-headed by then MEP for Northern Ireland, Martina Anderson. Anderson was an effective spokesperson, and several of Sinn Fins key Brexit priorities were indeed upheld by the EU. But this was primarily owed to a wider Irish effort, led by the Irish government, into which Sinn Fins approach was largely subsumed. Indeed, Sinn Fins policy of Special Status was only minimally distinct from the approach on Brexit adopted by both the Fine Gael-led government the Fianna Fil opposition in the South, and it diverged little from the policies of the SDLP and Alliance Party in the North. Pulling on what one Sinn Fin member of parliament described as the green jersey, the party largely rallied to the flag on Brexit, with electoral costs across a series of difficult elections in 2018 and 2019.

Critically, and despite claims to the contrary by Sinn Fins political opponents, Special Status was a blueprint for protecting the political-legal status quo rather than a plan to accelerate processes of constitutional change. It was a strategy for managing and mitigating risk, rather than for hastening Irish unity at all costs and by any means necessary.

In the final analysis, Brexit has posed more problems than it has represented opportunities for Sinn Fin, and it is ultimately unclear that the party has benefited from it per se. The new-found and unprecedented strength of the partys current position owes much to the weaknesses and tactical mistakes of other political actors (particularly in the DUP), and of decidedly non-Brexit-related domestic political factors, which includes an ongoing housing crisis in the Republic of Ireland. And it comes with its own political risks. On the cusp of holding office on both sides of the Irish border, Sinn Fin continues to face a number of tough organisational challenges, strategic decisions and policy compromises.

_____________________

About the Author

This blog draws on the authors published work in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations.

Jonathan Evershed is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of English at University College Cork, where his research as part of the ERDF-funded Ports, Past and Present project explores the impact of Brexit on political, cultural, and economic relationships across the Irish Sea.

Mary C. Murphy is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government and Politics at University College Cork. She hold a Jean Monnet Chair in European Integration, and is the author of Northern Irelands Future: Negotiating Brexits Unique Case (Agenda Publishing, 2018). Their book, Northern Ireland After Brexit is forthcoming with Agenda Publishing.

Mary Lou McDonald talking to mediabySinn Finis licensed underCC BY 2.0.

Read this article:

Far from having viewed Brexit as an opportunity for constitutional transformation, Sinn Fin has instead viewed it as a threat to be managed - British...