No.216 – The Northern Ireland Protocol: Al Capone Would be Proud of You!
Dear James,
That battered bulldog with the poodle voice, Lord Frost, the Minister for Brexit - the one who solemnly negotiated and signed the deal in 2019 that allowed Britain to exit the EU and then hailed it as ‘A great deal for the UK’ - tells us the ‘reality has changed ‘. ‘It doesn’t work for us’. What effrontery! What chutzpah! And to add to the outrage, he tells us that the UK was in a weak position when it signed. When did the Brexiteers ever admit to lack of certainty or even weakness? Does he expect us to shed a tear for our frail negotiating team as it was overwhelmed by the monstrous EU? Come off it Boris! As Dominic Cummings said in his recent blog, Boris never had any intention of abiding by the treaty! I‘m afraid James that yours is not a government. It’s a den of mediocre Mafiosi planning some shady drug deal with the international Cosa Nostra. Tell them what they want to hear and then double cross them. And if that leads to war, then all the better for us. 'We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets! ‘ Except that Churchill would be appalled by all this. He was a man of some honour. Only Al Capone would be proud of us!
Britain is on the verge of breaking international law and its treaty obligations. Simply by threatening to break international law, Boris Johnson has already trashed our dependability as an honourable nation. Now he’s going to do it! While not yet on the same practical scale, he is joining those international rule breakers such as Xi Xinping and Vladimir Putin. In the last decade China has occupied the reefs and islands in the South China Sea despite the ICJ declaring such actions as contrary to the Law of the Sea and contrary to every law of international behaviour. Russia sends state assassins abroad to poison opponents, shoots down airliners and imprisons opposition leaders willy nilly. The rest of the free world is looking on us as if one of its own has gone mad. This week, Leo Veradkar Ireland's deputy PM, warned governments doing trade deals with the UK that we are a nation that "doesn't necessarily keep its word". That’s a polite way of saying the UK is a gangster whom no one should trust!
Two days ago the EU went the extra mile. They agreed to swingeing cuts in the number of goods subject to checking at the Irish Sea border. Most food products will not need to be physically checked when entering Northern Ireland. Importers’ paper work will be cut and trusted trader schemes will ensure that more products are exempt from tariffs. The EU is genuinely interested in helping Northern Ireland to survive under the new arrangements. These major concessions assume that Britain will be willing to settle our differences. But what is our response? To pull out of the small print the issue of the European Court of Justice as the final arbiter of disputes!
You can call it tactics. It’s all a game of bluff. Going for the maximum advantage before settling some where in between. But this is more than that. This stinks of British Brexiteer exceptionalism writ large. The ECJ is the bête noir of the fanatical Brexiteers. It’s a red rag to their bull. They hate it. They know it could be a deal breaker and perhaps that’s what they want? For the Europeans however, the ECJ is an existential issue. It is the sine qua non of the European Single Market and indeed of the EU itself. Mr Coveney, Ireland’s Foreign Minister, said recently that this was the creation of a new "red line" which the EU cannot move on. So when you have the haters of the institution confronting the essential believers in the EU, there are bound to be sparks, if not a full scale conflagration.
Perhaps Frost is hoping to come up with the sort of arrangement that the Swiss have with Europe? They have a series of small intermediary institutions to deal with disputes. Nevertheless, the institution of last resort remains the ECJ. To the puritan Brexiteer even that would be seen as a blasphemy.
This, together with the looming clash over fishing rights and the recent Aukus deal, is just what Boris wanted. It’s a classic strategy of populists everywhere. Galvanize and distract their followers from the real issues by engaging their primal emotions about enemies everywhere. It took a chancer like Boris Johnson to commit this crime against our nation’s good standing in the world. Mrs May would not contemplate it. No other British government would have done it. But Boris has no principles and his merry band of disciples – of which you are one James – will follow him into the jaws of hell itself! One day you’ll have a lot to answer for, James. As I said, Al Capone would be proud of you!
Kind regards,
BH – Your Concerned Constituent