No. 168 - Shameless Boris Attempts to Rewrite the Brexit Deal
Dear James,
Last December Boris claimed to have pulled off the ultimate diplomatic coup to overcome the impasse preventing Britain withdrawing from the EU without wrecking the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. To avoid a hard border between the North and the South, something very likely to reignite the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in the province, he agreed to do something that all previous Prime Ministers had refused to do. He agreed to put the border in the Irish Sea and then went on to claim that this would not involve customs checks and the added documentation necessary for anyone trading between Northern Ireland and the mainland. This was always a claim too far and yesterday this fundamental contradiction in Boris’s version of the Withdrawal Treaty was revealed. The government intends to launch a domestic law called the UK Internal Market Bill, which according to the Financial Times, will do severe damage to the Withdrawal Treaty. In other words, Boris would be abrogating an International Treaty in order to avoid the embarrassment of threatening the integrity of the Union. Despite all his pleas that there would be no customs posts between the mainland and Northern Ireland, he was at last admitting that this was not the case and the only way to avoid it was to tear up the treaty!
In international diplomacy, the breaking of international treaties is considered a high crime. Russia may do it in Crimea, China may do it in the South China Sea and now it seems that our own government, that erstwhile paragon of an international rules based system, is joining the Gadarene swine in its rush to correct the embarrassing obligations Boris blundered into last December with Leo Varadkah, the Irish Taoiseach. Who will trust him or us after this? Already the EU is crying foul and this morning Nancy Pelosi and others in the US Congress stated categorically that if the new law went ahead, any Trade Deal with the US would be dead in the water. America has always been the key player in the decolonization of Ireland and the Good Friday Agreement will be defended by them to the end. And so it should be.
And that is the reason for Boris’s desperate bid to change the goal posts of a solemn international agreement. If you want to avoid reigniting tensions in Northern Ireland you cannot allow a hard border between North and South. This in turn means that Northern Ireland would have to stay in the Single EU market which in turn means that, in the absence of a Free Trade Agreement between the UK and the EU, any goods entering the North from the mainland or going to the mainland from the north would have to be subject to customs checks. This is what Boris attempted to deny last December and this is what he is trying to wriggle out of today. He claims that the Withdrawal Agreement of last December was ‘legally ambiguous’ and would leave Northern Ireland isolated from the rest of the UK. But it wasn’t ambiguous at all. He signed it. The man is simply doing a Trump and in the process is joining the ranks of international fraudsters. His arrogance and recklessness are the signature of someone who thinks he can ‘take back control’ at the same time as keeping all the goodies of the EU Single Market. While Mr Frost is asking the EU to be ‘more realistic’ in the negotiations, it is he and Boris who will soon have to face reality. How many times has he been told? He can’t have his cake and eat it!
Yesterday, your shambolic government tried to row back on its announcement. The new bill will be merely a minor ‘clarification’ of the legal terms of the Treaty when it is published tomorrow. This afternoon, Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis, confounded the Common by stating that the new bill would, ‘break the law in a very specific and limited way’. Sir Jonathan Jones, permanent secretary to the Government’s Legal Department has now resigned with reports saying he is "very unhappy" about the bill. He is the sixth senior civil servant to resign since December.
Boris couldn’t give a damn. As you James, sat passively behind Brandon Lewis in the chamber today, many of your constituents will have been appalled by your absence of principle and gut. You are clearly just a foot soldier in Boris’s craven march towards the cliff edge of our nation’s future mid-Atlantic isolation.
I hope you sleep peacefully tonight!
BH - Your Concerned Constituent