Sunday, 8 May 2022

The UK edges closer to a break up

Well, the local elections provided a bit of a kicking for the Conservatives. They lost Westminster and Wandsworth in London, councils that even Tony Blair couldn’t reach in 1997. In Scotland, they lost 63 seats, with the Tory vote shifting almost equally to the SNP, Labour and the LibDems. In Wales, another 86 seats slipped away and the party governing the UK dropping to fourth place. The Tories don't control a single council in Wales or Scotland. However, nowhere was more seismic than Northern Ireland.

Sinn Fein are the largest party, not because there has been a surge in support, it went up by barely 1%, but because the Unionist vote was split. The recently formed TUV (Traditional Unionist Voice) increased their vote by 5% and the moderate Alliance party by about the same, presumably mostly from the DUP, who lost seats and cannot now overtake Sinn Fein.

As the BBC’s Lewis Goodall says, the border in Northern Ireland, embracing only six of Ulster’s nine counties, was drawn in order to permanently guarantee a Unionist majority.

Anybody of my age will remember Sinn Fein (Ourselves alone) as the political wing of the IRA which gave an air of respectability to men who terrorised the UK for thirty years. So, it’s an amazing turn around to see SF topping the polls in both Northern Ireland and The Republic.

They will certainly provide the first minister in the north and who knows, at some point a future Taoiseach in the south. 

Their leader at Stormont, Michelle O’Neill, comes over well and she has done a lot to soften the image of the party which above all others, owes its existence to a determination to see a united Ireland. 

It is a bitter blow to Lord Frost and Boris Johnson because the likelihood of a majority in the NI Assembly being in favour of scrapping the NI protocol in 2024 is now virtually inconceivable.

If SF become as popular in Ireland as the SNP is in Scotland, the bookmakers will soon stop offering odds on the break up of the United Kingdom. And nobody should be surprised that Brexit - which the DUP aided and abetted at every opportunity- is at the bottom of it. 

The DUP leadership were warned explicitly, but they supported Johnson and believed his promise of there being no sea border in the Irish Sea. How stupid can you get? He immediately signed up to the NIP knowing it meant a sea border, but imagining he could somehow renegotiate it afterwards.

Sir Roger Gale, Tory MP for North Thanet pointed out:

The Johnson quote about the border comes from August 2020, ten months after he signed an agreement explicitly agreeing to a sea border - exactly the sort of pledge from him which should put everybody on the alert.

Lord Frost, who despite resigning from the government, still seems to want to influence policy by shouting from the side lines, thinks the EU are duty bound to renegotiate the Withdrawal Agreement but if they did, and there’s absolutely no indication they’re prepared to do so, I assume they would simply go over the same arguments and arrive at….the NIP.

He says Northern Ireland is not part of the EU, but he negotiated and agreed the deal which makes it seem that it is, and this is what annoys the ultra Brexiteers. How clever they thought they were in 2019.

The QC George Peretz also pointed out that Frost is wrong anyway. The EU commission has not refused “any kind of negotiation” and even the anonymous foreign office source only says that the Commission has taken a “rigid and hardline” negotiating position, which is not the same thing at all.

Professor Chris Grey points out that Lord Frost’s claim that remainers said Johnson would 'never get rid of the backstop' is correct but nonsense at the same time, because allowing the UK to remain in the EU customs union was actually a reluctant concession on the part of Brussels, and the NI protocol was simply going back to what the EU had already proposed and which both May and Johnson declared ‘no British prime minister could accept’ - and now you can see why.  Although Frost himself can't apparently.

I am afraid we took another large step in the direction of the United Kingdom breaking up. Johnson will go down in history as the man whose reckless stupidity started the fracture.

It's amazing that Brexiteers couldn't see that leaving one union because they wrongly thought is constantly on the verge of collapse, has actually triggered the break up of the much older union on these islands.

Who knew?  Only several living prime ministers, dozens of constitutional and trade experts and the 16 million odd people who voted to remain in the EU.

SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon tweeted her congratulations.

There is a certain irony that the UK government and the DUP will now strain every sinew to defeat a democratic vote since there is no chance of the Assembly supporting a triggering of A16. 

In the 1960s the troubles grew out of a demand for Catholics to have equal voting rights. At the time only ratepayers were permitted to vote and Catholics, predominantly the poorest and most likely to rent, were effectively second class citizens and denied a vote.

Apparently, if you were a landlord owing 20 properties, you had 20 votes. Amazing, eh?. 

But the one certain thing now is that the DUP will refuse to join the power sharing assembly. 

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