Steve James
Leading US politicians have indicated that no trade deal with the UK will be agreed if Britain’s departure from the European Union (EU) undermines the 1998 Good Friday Agreement (GFA) in Northern Ireland.
Their warnings run counter to the promises by President Donald Trump of a “very substantial” trade deal, worth three to five times the value of current trade between the US and UK, post-Brexit. His promise is the lynchpin of the economic and political strategy being pursued by Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government in order to offset the loss of trade between the UK and the EU and to reinforce Britain’s declining world position through deeper integration into the US military apparatus.
In April, House of Representatives speaker, Democrat Nancy Pelosi, told an audience at the London School of Economics, “If there were to be any weakening of the Good Friday accords then there would be no chance whatsoever, a non-starter, for a US-UK trade agreement.”
Last month, the head of the Congressional Ways and Means Committee, which oversees all US trade deals, Democrat Richard Neal—who also leads the Friends of Ireland caucus—advised the Irish government of Leo Varadkar on how to respond to British attempts to junk the so-called “backstop.”
This refers to the measures agreed by former Prime Minister Theresa May with Brussels, meant to prevent the return of a hard customs border with the Republic of Ireland, an EU member state, post-Brexit. The “backstop”—a limited form of customs union— was rejected as a threat to UK sovereignty and its relations with Northern Ireland by Johnson’s “hard Brexit” backers, who are now threatening to leave without a deal if it is not removed from the EU’s proposed Withdrawal Agreement.
Neal reassured Dublin that he would have “little enthusiasm” for any trade deal that jeopardised the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), adding that even in the best circumstances a trade deal with Britain could take up to five years to negotiate.
Rallying behind Dublin is not only politically popular in a country where one in 10 of the population self-identify as being of Irish origin. It reflects concern for the value to US corporations of Ireland as a cheap labour platform and tax haven for US corporations seeking to penetrate the European market.
Founded in 1981, the Friends of Ireland Congressional grouping played a key role in events leading up to the GFA and agreeing terms with Sinn Fein, which received much of its funding from the US. Since the GFA, US investment in the Republic of Ireland has mushroomed, utilising its low corporate tax rates to hide the gargantuan profits made by the US-owned tech sector worldwide. In 2016, the EU took the Irish government to court demanding it collect €13 billion tax owed by Apple to the Irish exchequer.
The Good Friday Agreement was instrumental in creating a stable platform for this flow of wealth from and through Ireland. It brought three decades of civil conflict in Northern Ireland to an end. Signed by the British Labour government of Tony Blair, the Irish government and eight unionist and nationalist parties, the agreement also institutionalised sectarian divisions by linking participation in the devolved “power-sharing” assembly in Stormont to designated representation of parties with hostile communities—pro-British Unionist/Loyalist/Protestant versus Irish Republican/Catholic—who nevertheless worked in tandem to make the north safe and open it up transnational investment and trade.
The agreement freed the British military for bloody deployments worldwide, as the once heavily militarised border almost disappeared, so that it is now crossed by tens of thousands of people and vehicles daily. Cross border trade is worth billions of euros.
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