Brexiteers were warned by former prime ministers Blair and Major and advisers like Jonathan Powell and Alastair Campbell that Brexit, and in particular the hard Brexit pursued by both May and Johnson, would destabilise Northern Ireland and put the peace process at risk. Former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern also campaigned desperately to stop the hard won peace being broken.
All to no avail. They were all accused of scaremongering.
Now Belfast is suffering nightly disturbances as crowds attack the police, setting cars and buses on fire but the Telegraph and Lord Caine seem to want us to think it is all a coincidence and would have happened anyway. The article, by Harry Yorke, Whitehall editor and Defence and security correspondent Dominic Nicholls says:
"Tensions boiled over last week over the decision not to prosecute 24 Sinn Fein politicians, including deputy first minister Michelle O’Neill, who attended an IRA funeral in an alleged breach of lockdown rules"
I don't deny this played a part, but it is well known that anger in the loyalist communities have been rising for months as the details of the NI protocol became ever clearer. Government assurances from Johnson may have helped to keep the lid on things until reality burst through in January and people began to see empty shelves and to experience for themselves what the protocol actually meant for GB-NI trade.
Caine knows NI well, if you read his Wikipedia page you can see that although Yorkshire born he has studied Ireland from University and worked as an adviser to former NI Secretary Theresa Villiers. But a senior member of the SDLP notes that, "although he understood Unionism in Ireland, he had no real understanding of Irish republicanism, and no sympathy for it."
Villiers, who amazingly voted for Brexit, was on Newsnight last night also trying to claim the events of the last ten days were nothing to do with leaving the single market and the customs union. In 2016 she described suggestions that the peace process would be jeopardised by Brexit as "scaremongering of the worst kind." She was squirming.
What she, Caine and the Telegraph is trying to do is absolve Brexit of ANY blame at all and this clearly is not going to succeed.
In the same issue we also get a piece by Lucy Burton about the CEO of J P Morgan: Brexit 'cannot possibly be positive' for UK, JP Morgan chief says. Jamie Dimon has apparently warned that he might have to shift all bankers serving European Union clients out of London as "regulators on the Continent seek to steal the City's business."
"In his annual letter to shareholders, the US bank chief said that Brexit 'cannot possibly' boost the UK economy and warned of mass job moves as Brussels seeks to exclude London from its markets."
In the usual way, the article says Ernst and Young research indicates 'only' 7,600 financial services jobs have 'so far' moved out of the UK due to Brexit, a tiny proportion of roles in the UK’s finance sector and far less than previously predicted. But it also notes:
"Xavier Rolet, the former boss of the London Stock Exchange, said at the weekend that he still believes research which it commissioned in 2016 that suggested 232,000 roles could go."
Still a long way to go to those sunlit uplands then, eh?
I once registered for free articles with The Telegraph and I am now being bombarded with emails with increasingly special offers to get me to become a subscriber - it's now £30 a year. They seem to be getting increasingly desperate. I pay £25 a month for the FT - about ten times as much but at least I feel I'm getting something closer to the truth rather that propaganda.
