Thursday 18 March 2021

Johnson's Brexit nightmare has only just begun

In what appears to be an extraordinary outburst, Dominic Raab our foreign secretary, not the brightest individual admittedly, has told US congressmen and women, that the EU is “trying to erect a barrier down the Irish Sea between Northern Ireland and Great Britain that is challenging the spirit of Northern Ireland Protocol and the Good Friday agreement.” He has been a member of the government which chose the option and then negotiated the details of an international treaty that clearly placed a border down the Irish Sea.

This is the kind of inversion of the truth uttered by despots. Hitler accused Poland of attacking Germany in 1939 as a pretext to starting WW2 and Putin accused Ukraine of provocations as an excuse to take over in Crimea.

Raab reiterated his support for the GFA and questioned whether the EU had made the "same level of unequivocal commitment as the UK on refusing to set up any border infrastructure."

Nobody asked him where he supposed the border between the U.K. and the EU would be in future if there was no border on land or sea. It is the question which has dogged Brexit from the beginning and which Brexiteers are still finding difficult to answer.

Voices calling for the NI protocol to be renegotiated or scrapped altogether are growing all the time but nobody, least of all Raab, has any idea what would be put in its place. No country outside members of the single market has a completely open border and there is no way the EU could or would tolerate the idea. Apart from anything else it would go against WTO rules as well as the whole purpose of Brexit.

One of the people I follow on Twitter, professor Chris Grey tweeted:

In January, the NI minister Brandon Lewis, again on Twitter, denied there was a border in the Irish sea at all and Raab at one point in 2018 admitted that he hadn't realised how important the Dover/Calais route was for UK-EU trade.  This is the level of men who govern us at the moment.

If Raab or Johnson or Gove or Frost thought they would be able to wriggle out of the legal commitments they entered into when the WA was settled in 2019, they might want to note the text which was released yesterday, St Patrick's day, after President Joe Biden and Taoiseach Micheal Martin held a virtual meeting.

It is a very long statement indeed and covers a whole lot of different things, mostly pretty innocuous, but it included this:

They [Biden and Martin] called for the good faith implementation of international agreements designed to address the unique circumstances on the island of Ireland

The Irish have played a strong hand well. They used the power they enjoy as an EU member state to force Brexiteers to own Brexit - and by doing so, place the Irish border problem squarely in the UK' hands.

They are now enlisting the power of the (very pro-Irish) American president to force the UK to meet its commitments.  With their proposal to charge into Asia and annoy China, Brexiteers are soon going to find they have no friends at all among the world's three giant trading blocs.

Personally, I am beginning to think the NI protocol was a mistake, although apart from rejoining the single market (which I think is inevitable anyway at some future date) I don't have a solution - but then again neither do the Brexiteers.

I noted in yesterday's science and technology committee session, when Dominic Cummings appeared he claimed Johnson had visited him at his home the week before he became PM and begged him to join his administration as his chief adviser.

Cummings said Johnson asked him whether he would "come into Downing Street to try and help sort out the huge Brexit nightmare".

The use of the word nightmare is interesting. I don't know if was a verbatim quote or Cummings' shorthand but it says all you need to know about Brexit.

For Johnson though, it will never be over - in fact it's only just starting.

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