Quelle surprise! Another Brexit sell-out with the ‘Windsor Framework’ replacement of the Northern Ireland Protocol? While we await details of the agreement, some aspects are clear – as are their implications.
Politics – and EU politics especially – excel at obfuscating issues. The EU has, from its start, wrapped itself in Byzantine laws and procedures to obscure its underhand goals. We are now being told that Prime Minister Sunak has done extremely well to improve the post-Brexit situation with Northern Ireland, having had to meet what the BBC calls ‘complex challenges’ around a thorny issue. This idea of ‘intricate matters having been cleverly settled’ is a smokescreen.
Yes, resolving the NI Protocol is a complex issue, but compared to what? In 1993, Czechoslovakia successfully split into two completely new different countries, less than four years after the Berlin Wall came down. That was complex. Even more so was the reunification of Germany in 1990. This saw two diametrically opposed states merge together: one capitalist and democratic; the other communist and totalitarian. As if that was not enough, the two countries had over a million foreign troops and their dependents on their soil. And then there’s the matter of nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Now that really is complicated. Yet the reunification happened within a year of the Wall coming down. Where’s there a will there’s a way. So you see my point on the NI Protocol: in comparison, reaching this stage on a poxy little trade agreement nearly seven years after the Brexit referendum is really not very impressive. But where was the will?
There is already much back-patting over the fact that parcels and pets will now, thanks to Rishi and dear Ursula, be able to move freely between the UK and the UK…er, sorry, I mean between Britain and Northern Ireland. Whoopee. There will be fewer forms and less red tape, and wider green and narrower red lanes, for ‘trading’ between the UK and the UK… oops, sorry again – the UK and Northern Ireland. The EU has graciously permitted this, and the UK government is falling over itself to express its gratitude at this magnanimity from a foreign power in granting such a wonderous dispensation in the country’s internal affairs.
The role of the European Court of Justice still hangs over the UK. Dammit – I mean Northern Ireland. The ECJ has been the main conduit behind European federalism since its inception. At any and every opportunity it has advanced this cause. It’s not suddenly going to stop doing so now. Take two countries. Country A ambles about minding its own business. But Country B can impose some of its laws on Country A. And Country B isn’t even a country – it’s a political organisation. How demeaning for the UK to play the role of Country A.
Yes, the Windsor Framework is an improvement, but only in the sense that a mugger is no longer threatening to shoot you in the head, just to break your legs. We’re still being mugged by the EU. Yet the media are making it out that the EU has been wonderfully accommodating and generous to a fault.
Let us also not follow the shoals of red herrings trying to avoid a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. (Which lane are they in?) EU laws will be kept to a ‘minimum necessary’ to avoid that hard border. How you define ‘necessary’ depends on which polity you represent. We are repeatedly told that a hard border would contravene the Good Friday Agreement. It would not. All the Good Friday Agreement says about any border is that it would be beneficial, if circumstances allow, to demilitarise it. That’s it.
The EU still has a legal hold on the UK and the UK government is allowing the EU to tell the country how it can or cannot go about its internal business.
Don’t get lost in the forest of details. These are the fundamentals of our new situation. An improvement on what went before, certainly; but the country’s sovereignty and democracy remain seriously compromised.
1.”Brexit has not stemmed migration numbers; in reality, it merely changed the flags of the people arriving [Indians, Pakistanis, Nigerians, Chinese]”- Tom Calver, Sunday Times, 19 March 2023. Out with Normans, Saxons and Romans, and in with the Global South and Far East Communists?
2.The Great Replacement carries on unopposed, as we are told that the British people are quite happy with legal immigration.
3.A brief anecdote: my wife and I went for a “Pregnant-Parent-Day” lunch in our small seaside town. Our table neighbours consisted of an 88-year old Mother, a Christian Salvationist, and her husband, a retired engineer, formerly a soldier and miner, both amiable patriots. Their middle-aged daughter’s conversation, however, went from the way that the great nurse Mary Seacole was ignored just because she was black to the therapy session that precedes her online art lessons, while her equally ugly and unmarried male companion wondered if her father had seen “Pride”, a film in which his fellow “gays” joined the miners in comradely protest at “Tory pit closures” (he hadn’t, of course). With “wokes” like that in this random sample, we have our work cut out.
“And another people takes the land and still it is not we” (Chesterton 1907)
Northern Ireland is already an economic basket case dependent on handouts and subsidies from Britain, in comparison to the Republic of Ireland which has boomed. A hard border with the Republic would make matters even worse, as well as fuelling sectarian hatred. Economically speaking, it would be better for all concerned if the hard border were with the mainland. Would free flow within Ireland spell a united Ireland? Yes.