No. 170 - Are you Prepared to Break the Law, James?

Dear James, 

Yesterday Boris stitched up his rebel MPs by agreeing the Neill Amendment to the Internal Market Bill which allows the government to unilaterally abrogate key clauses in the UK ‘divorce agreement’ of last January.  However, the fact that MPs will now be able to vote on the bill instead of just Ministers does not mean that the threat of breaking the law disappears. It simply spreads complicity to a wider population i.e. parliament. So now, even you James will become directly complicit in the threat to break the law. Yesterday Lord Keen, the UK’s law officer for Scotland saw the light and became the latest resignation in this sorry saga. 

Once upon a time, ‘My word is my bond’ was in your party’s DNA, and respect for decency and the rule of law were its fundamental principles. Yesterday Ursula Von der Leyn, the EU Commission President reminded Britain of what Margaret Thatcher said about this. ‘Britain does not break treaties’. The leader of the centre-right European People's Party, added his voice, "Great Britain, you are losing your credibility on the global level."

The Conservative Party James, was formed after the French Revolution to fight radicalism in any form yet to fight what it sees as radicalism it has now adopted its own form of radicalism. Lord Salisbury once said, “The fear that Radicals may triumph, is the only final cause that the Conservative Party can plead for its own existence’. And today the new ‘Revolutionary Conservatives’ under Boris and Cummings are using radical techniques to destroy the settled progressive policies of the last seventy years. Disruption and insurgency is the name of their game. It seem they will stop at nothing, not even the trashing of Britain’s long standing reputation for upholding the rule of law through a truly independent judiciary.   

This insurgency is embodied in the person of Dominic Cummings who has said that to reform something, first you must break it. With Brexit now, ‘done’, one of this unelected person’s prime motivations is to create Britain’s version of ARPA. ARPA stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency, was created by Eisenhauer in 1958, now has the word Defence added to its title (DARPA) and has a budget of $3 bn pa. It is a ‘skunkworks’ that created such world beating inventions as the internet and GPS. Dominic wants its own DARPA to invent the next Google or Amazon, in other words to make Britain into ‘the best place in the world to invent the future’. For this he will need huge subsidies and that is why the EU negotiations are blocked. The EU has strict guidelines for government subsidising businesses and preventing one nation taking advantage of another. They call it the ‘level playing field’ and Dominic will go to any lengths to avoid agreeing such a straightjacket. Nothing must stand in the way of Dominic Cummings. Not even the break up of the United Kingdom or the crashing of the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. Not even breaking the law. Unelected, obsessive Dominic is going for broke. And Boris is his ‘useful idiot’! 

Last January Johnson claimed a diplomatic breakthrough by solemnly signing the EU Withdrawal Agreement. He now tells us that the EU ‘’smuggled’ some small print into the text that did damage to the UK’s internal market and that it was a ‘substandard’ deal that needs to be redrawn. That is not just outrageous, it is bunkum. At the time, he was told by a chorus of politicians and pundits that it would clearly mean a border in the Irish Sea and its associated customs checks. Boris was either negligent as a negotiator or he deliberately obfuscated the text to get his Withdrawal Agreement through. Wriggle and outrage as much as he wants, he will now either have to perform yet another U-Turn or continue along his path, together with the spineless Robert Buckland, and the supine Attorney General, Suella Braverman, to the precipice and beyond. 

The central problems with all of this is, of course, that Mr Cummings and his crew were elected by no one. Johnson was elected with a thumping majority but being empty of ideas except for those that would enhance his Churchillian pretensions, ‘love bombed’ Dominic’s agenda. Yesterday’s stitch up is immaterial. The threat is still there. For Mr Cummings, a no-deal will be welcomed as a triumph. It will allow him, when Europe is forced to close the border in Ireland, to accuse Europe of malfeasance and so many other things. Imagine the feeding frenzy of the right wing tabloids when that happens! Perfect for a populist, rebel rousing ‘genius’. A tragedy for Britain’s standing in the world. 

Your voting record to date James shows that you will dutifully comply with your leader and follow the herd.  Welcome to the world of political law breaking! You should be ashamed of yourself! 

Kind regards, 

BH – Your Concerned Constituent