What Is in the New Brexit Deal?

Northern Ireland’s border controls and its ability to make trade rules are among the central issues covered in the latest agreement between the E.U. and Britain.

New York Times By Benjamin Mueller and Matina Stevis-Gridneff

The biggest roadblock: the Irish border

For Britain, the thorniest part about leaving the European Union has proved to be the Irish border, an invisible line between Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom, and the Republic of Ireland, a member of the European Union.

...Mrs. May’s solution was the so-called backstop. It kept all of Britain in the European customs union, possibly indefinitely, forcing it to impose the same tariffs as other European countries. And it required Northern Ireland to hew even more closely to European single market rules.

Mr. Johnson tried to find another solution, namely killing off the backstop but adopting different versions of some of its most contentious features.
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What replaces the backstop?

Mr. Johnson’s plan — unnamed, as yet — would pull the whole United Kingdom out of the European customs union. That was a big victory for Brexiteers, opening a path to Britain striking its own trade deals, including with the United States.

It is also supposed to allay unionists in Northern Ireland because that region would legally be part of the United Kingdom’s customs territory, allowing it to retain its close ties to Britain and to benefit from future trade deals.

But the only way to avoid checks on goods passing from Northern Ireland into the Republic of Ireland was for the north to apply the European Union’s rules and procedures on tariffs — the same ones the Republic of Ireland follows.

...So far, though, this new system of checks has proved too much to bear for unionist lawmakers from Northern Ireland, who have refused Mr. Johnson’s deal and could ultimately be its undoing.

The backstop could last forever. What about the new plan?

Another major objection to Mrs. May’s backstop plan was that elected leaders in Northern Ireland, the region most affected, had no say in what trading rules they would follow or how long they would last.

On this point, Mr. Johnson won a major concession from European leaders. The new deal gives Northern Ireland’s elected body a chance to weigh in on the arrangements and potentially spurn its obligations altogether.

But Northern Ireland could not opt out of European trading rules immediately. Those would take effect at the end of a transition period in 2020 and remain in place for four years before anyone in Northern Ireland could object.

And even then, the Democratic Unionist Party could not, on its own, pull Northern Ireland out from under European rules. (The voting procedure is complex, but lawmakers from other parties in the Northern Ireland Assembly would have to agree.) Unionist lawmakers suggested on Thursday that that was a deal breaker.

Level playing field? Leave it to later.

...Once it is out of the bloc, Britain could be tempted to throw out the rules or water them down. For while they are seen as among the world’s best for the protection of consumers and, increasingly, the environment, they can also be quite stringent and costly to businesses.

...The issue is of such concern that the new agreement entirely omits it. Instead, discussion of a level playing field has been relegated to the nonbinding Political Declaration between the two parties, meaning it can be changed in future.

Critics were quick to see environmental and other loopholes in this detail that could drive down the quality (and, some would say, costs) of certain goods in Britain.

What’s the future for the U.K. and E.U.?

This may be the end of negotiations (may be!) but it’s also the beginning of talks for a new chapter in Britain’s relations with the European Union. The future relationship will be a matter of debate and negotiation that will most likely take years to crystallize.
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Based on history, such an agreement could take years to negotiate, and would become complicated if Britain started to diverge from European standards on the production of various sensitive goods.

It would also suffer setbacks if the global environment became so fraught that the European Union and Britain found themselves on opposite sides of spats, turning talks over trade hostile.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/world/europe/brexit-deal-details.html