BELFAST — Results from the Northern Ireland Assembly election have answered a key post-Brexit question: Most lawmakers at Stormont in Belfast want the trade protocol to stay, not go.
This matters because the protocol — a part of the 2019 Withdrawal Agreement that the U.K. government has spent the past year refusing to implement in full and threatening to disrupt further — contains an easily misunderstood “consent” section.
At first glance, it gives the newly elected assembly a bona-fide chance in 2024 to shoot the whole thing down. But in reality, the results from Thursday’s election mean there’s no longer any chance this can happen. The new 90-seat assembly will have no more than 37 unionist members hostile to the protocol. Unionists lost three seats and are now at least nine short of the bare majority needed.
The protocol text does grant Stormont lawmakers the theoretical power to vote in 2024 to dump the treaty, which left Northern Ireland within the EU’s single market for goods when the rest of the U.K. exited at the start of 2021. This arrangement has required new customs and sanitary checks on British goods when they arrive at Northern Ireland’s ports, not when they cross the land border with the Republic of Ireland, an EU member
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