Rishi Sunak won the race to become Britain’s new prime minister by promising to fix his predecessor’s fiscal errors and unify his party. Oddly, he wasn’t asked to say much about Brexit — which has hobbled the country for the past six years and remains the government’s biggest challenge. Addressing it will make cleaning up the budgetary mess look easy.
Sunak got an abrupt reminder of the trouble ahead after less than a week in office, when a quarrel over trade rules between Northern Ireland, Great Britain and the Republic of Ireland flared anew. When the UK left the European Union, it was understood that an open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic was essential to preserving the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. But this meant Brexit would require an economic border in the Irish Sea, between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.
Desperate to “get Brexit done,” Britain’s government agreed to a so-called protocol making that stipulation in 2020 and set the issue aside. In protest at the new border, the North’s Democratic Unionist Party shut down the region’s power-sharing assembly in May. The Tories then moved legislation in Westminster to unilaterally cancel the protocol they’d previously agreed to. A trade war between the UK and the EU became a distinct possibility.
