Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

It can come as no surprise to anyone that the Boris plan is hitting the EU buffers, because it offends against all the principles that underpin the EU as a political as well as trading union. It offends against the good Friday Agreement because an all Ireland economy and social order, now enjoyed, will be fractured. Almost everybody in NI, except the leadership of the DUP, opposes it.  And it will not work anyway.

The government knew all this  from the very beginning.

So, either:

Boris allowed the ERG to drive its shape so as to neuter their power, then to agree with the EU a version much closer to May. The opposition parties would  be offered the chance to vote it through in time for an orderly departure or bear the responsibility for a crash out, reversing the political tables. The snag in that scenario is that the combined and rather disjointed opposition probably would allow it through, but with an amendment attached requiring a confirmatory referendum of the terms, with Remain as an option. That would likely result in the end of the Brexit project. And at the following general election a Tory wipe out.

Or:

Boris and his government are hell bent on a crash Brexit, the offer was never intended to be taken seriously, but provides a backdrop of EU intransigence, to allow a No Deal exit on October 31st.

But what about the Benn Act?

This is where it gets into the hidden agenda conspiracy stuff. Something, everyone agrees, is going on behind the scenes which gives the government a chirpy confidence.  I believe this is the fact that EU Law trumps UK law, ie the Benn Act. Article 50 is EU Law and  states that on leaving, a State can do so without a deal for the future or a Withdrawal Agreement. The government’s lawyers clearly believe it would be very difficult for the UK Supreme Court to rule against that and if it did, irony of ironies, Boris could appeal to the hated ECJ.

It’s not over yet and many fear it never will be.

But then again, like the Berlin Wall, the end could be quite sudden.

Somehow the DUP mamanges to put about the fake news that it speaks for the majority in Northern Ireland. It does not. In the 2017 general election it won 36% of the votes cast. In the 2016 Brexit Referendum Northern Ireland voted to stay in the EU by a significant margin, 55.8% Remain –  44.2% Leave. The DUP is a Leave party, in a Remain nation.

The majority of people, organisations, businesses and voters in Northern Ireland want to stay in the EU and are opposed to the ridiculous and unworkable new deal  submitted by Boris to the EU, who have already rejected it. There is no democracy anywhere to be seen.

The reason the Good Friday Agreement works is because it uses the umbrella of the EU to acknowledge all of Ireland as one country for the practical purposes of everyday life and business. One economy, freedom of movement,  domicile, goods, services, capital and labour. No borders. Two systems of government. One a fully functioning independent Republic, the other a peculiar power sharing system which spends a good deal of time not working. But this malfunction hardly matters because the combination of the UK to which Ulster is attached, Ireland of which it is a part, and the EU of which it is a member, makes its own system all but redundant.

Ulster voted to remain in the EU and the majority support Theresa May’s backstop. The DUP, the Tory Party’s ally, represents only the fundamentalist and extreme interpretation of protestantism and demands as its price not only a social order of societies and marches which would be banned on the mainland UK, but also that their country should be dragged out of the EU against its democratic will.

Boris now proposes customs checks and a mixed trading relationship which plainly will not satisfy either the majority in both parts of Ireland nor the rest of the EU. On top of this the whole thing is to be subject to approval or veto by the Norther Ireland Executive and Assembly, both of which are shut down and unlikely to reopen.

I struggle to see how on earth the EU can agree to such stuff or how on earth it will ever get through the Commons. But if you think it all good and go, so be it. You clearly know something I don’t.