Tuesday 9 February 2021

Journalists have a lot to answer for

Tim Stanley at The Telegraph seems to be a man proud of his role in Brexit. Someone tweeted a link to a recent article of his about the growing border problems and an earlier one where he seemed to boast of having a leading role in getting and winning the referendum. If I was him, I might be a bit more circumspect about it. The shock wave of damage rippling through the British economy has barely started and sooner or later people will want to know who was to blame. Journalists are not going to escape public opprobrium.

This is his tweet from February last year:

Note he refers to The Telegraph's thirty year "war against the EU" and his Twitter feed describes him as a historian which somehow I doubt. Unwittingly perhaps, he puts his finger on the problem Brexiteers have with the EU. They simply hate it. They also hate foreigners, especially European ones and they hate Europe.

We are all collateral damage. They are prepared to sacrifice anybody and everybody in the name of Brexit. No matter what the cost is and no matter how long it takes. They will never be convinced the EU is anything other than an evil empire.

Stanley's recent article is: Border bureaucracy isn't a reason to soften Brexit. It's proof the EU is a protectionist racket and as a sub-title he says, "if problems at the border can’t be fixed, the UK has to "move faster to trade with the rest of the world."

He calls for the NI protocol "to be renegotiated or dumped" and goes on:

"Failing that, we have to change the way we do things: hire more customs people, export less to the continent, buy British, and expand trade with other parts of the world (after decades of deriding Australian wines, I note that we’re now their biggest importer by volume). And whatever Rishi Sunak cooks up in his Budget on March 5, this is not the time to pile costs on business or increase regulation."

The sheer insanity of it is really amazing.  Where we are going to replace £600 billion of trade overnight he doesn't actually explain. How easy it must all seem sitting in front of his keyboard at home.

Men like Johnson and Gove and Stanley have so much self confidence and yet so little to be confident about. They have blundered into Brexit with zero understanding of the risks, what it entailed, how to achieve it, what the consequences might be or indeed anything at all.  Future historians, surveying the ruins of a once great nation, may be hard pushed to explain how fools like these rose to such heights of power and influence

On the NI protocol, I spotted a tweet from Owen Paterson about a paper with yet another unicorn style solution to the vexed border issue. We had the Alternative Arrangements Commission in 2019 with completely off the wall "technological" solutions including air ships and drones patrolling the land border.  Paterson seems to accept that won't work now, although he and plenty of others were right behind it a the time. 

Paterson is on the board of the Centre for Brexit policy, a think-tank, and they have republished an updated version of a paper from July last year proposing something called 'mutual enforcement.'  He is suggesting the UK government passes a law making it illegal for anyone in NI to export goods to the Republic which do not meet EU law. The Republic would pass a similar law covering illegal goods moving the other way.

It's quite a detailed paper but I don't see anybody rushing to take it up and barely anybody has bothered to comment on it. I assume the EU have already dismissed it out of hand. 

As far as I can see, it would remove the need for a defined border on land or sea but at the price of shifting border surveillance to every retail and business premises on the entire island. Everybody would become a potential suspect. It is a recipe for sectarian mistrust. 

I raise it not because it has the slightest chance of being accepted but because it is a measure of just how desperate Brexiteers are to dump the NI protocol. IDS has already called for it to be scrapped and we know the DUP are starting a campaign to get rid of it. What none of them have done is suggest a workable alternative. 

Northern Ireland voted to remain 56 - 44% and have received any number of assurances that Brexit wouldn't have any impact on their lives, not least by Boris Johnson. Yet once again it is moving centre stage and threatening to break the union apart.. 

Here is Gove most recently in December offering warm words that have turned out to be disastrously wrong:

Gove said yesterday a 'Pandora's Box [had been] opened' on the Northern Ireland Protocol but 'it can be made to work' - something you might expect him to say he since he helped to negotiate it. His recent letter to Maros Sefcovic has gone down very badly in EU circles. Tony Connelly at RTE, a man with good diplomatic connections in the EU tweeted:

Peter Foster at the FT tweeted:

I wonder how much longer Gove, Johnson, et al will go on with the fantasy that Brexit is a good thing that we will all be grateful for one day?  It can't be much longer can it?

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