Monday 20 March 2023

The Windsor Framework and BoJo

The Daily Telegraph claims to have been told the DUP intends to vote against the Windsor Framework. This will come as no surprise to anyone listening to or reading tweets from members of the unionist community over the last few weeks, ever since Sunak announced the deal on 27 February. You only had to read the details to see that the WF was more or less the same as the NIP with a bit of added practical detail. In principle, it is little different.

 Assuming the report is correct, what will Sunak do?

He could easily force a Bill through parliament even if the ERG opposed it - as they probably will if the DUP rejected the deal first - because the other parties, Labour, LibDems, Greens, etc all support the new arrangements.

If the DUP does refuse to join the power-sharing executive as expected, the WF would have changed nothing but the legislation permanently embedding a sea border, introducing border checks that have been suspended so far, and essentially driving a wedge between NI and GB will be in place. This would make any future renegotiation far more difficult.

If the UK government was serious about finding a solution the DUP would have been closely involved from the beginning, even sitting in with the negotiators. Instead, everything is shrouded in secrecy, a 'deal is announced and sold to the DUP under false pretences. It's obvious why this happens. There is no solution that allows Brexit, and neither a land nor a sea border. But since the government has to keep up the illusion that there is in order to preserve Brexit, the charade continues.

I honestly don’t see any way out. Let’s be honest, the seven tests that the DUP has set are totally unrealistic after Brexit. The EU will never be able to offer a deal that enables the DUP to declare success or anything that even remotely resembles success. After, six years of talks, the two sides are about as far apart as it’s possible to be.

We can all be critical of the DUP and other unionist parties like the TUV for supporting Brexit. Some of them may have wanted to recreate a land border while others were just gulled into thinking there wouldn’t be any problems by Johnson, Gove, Theresa Villiers, and others, but the fact remains their community feels hard done by.

I don’t want to put too much on this, but if you can’t have either a sea border or a land border without upsetting one community or the other in Northern Ireland and risking a return to violence, Brexit itself is in question.

The only way to avoid ANY border is to rejoin the EU. This isn’t going to happen next week let’s face it. But aligning rules and regulations is certainly possible, as is rejoining the customs union. That would reduce checks and make the border far less intrusive. In the absence of any definitive list (indeed any list at all) of what EU regulations the government is desperate to be rid of, this option must be attractive and on the table.

But it would be the feared BRINO, Brexit in name only, and cast serious doubt on Brexit’s long-term future. What would be the point of following EU rules while having less say than we had as a member? We may as well rejoin.

I’m sure this is in the back of the mind of all the leading Brexit supporters and the reason they will fight tooth and nail to stop it.

Boris Johnson


On Wednesday, the former PM will give evidence to the Commons privileges committee live on TV.

Later today we should get to see the 50-page dossier provided by his legal team (costs paid by taxpayers) which he hopes will exonerate him completely from the charge he misled MPs about the extent of his knowledge of partygate. If true, it begs the question of why it wasn’t forthcoming before the Metropolitan Police fined him and others for attending parties in Downing Street during lockdown.

The Telegraph's Camilla Turner says his friends talk of 'bombshell evidence' about to emerge which apparently consists of statements that his advisers told him shortly before he spoke in Parliament last year that no COVID rules had been broken in Number 10.

That's it. Although the then prime minister was actually in the room when the rules were clearly being broken (with photographs to prove it) his get-out-of-jail-free card is that some advisers 'told him' to ignore the evidence of his own eyes and accept that no rules were broken. He will come across as a complete buffoon under questioning.

Against this, the privileges committee has comments from a witness saying Johnson told a packed No 10 gathering in November 2020, when strict Covid restrictions were in force, that “this is probably the most unsocially distanced gathering in the UK right now”.

Who to believe? A congenital liar or a blameless civil servant?

We shouldn’t forget that all the time, cost and trouble the nation is going to, to prove a liar told lies is only necessary because he, Johnson the liar, simply refuses to acknowledge and admit that he lied.

There is overwhelming evidence including that of our own eyes and ears that he misled parliament. It’s ironic that his ‘evidence’ will be given under an “oath of honesty.” Since he was perfectly happy to lie in the House of Commons why does anyone believe he’ll be straight now?

Anyway, it should be good fun on Wednesday before the seven-strong group of MPs on the privileges committee, four of them Conservatives. I bet he's being coached to within an inch of his life.

Dominic Cummings

Finally, to help us all understand why the country finds itself in such an almighty mess, have a look at the following tweet that came from Dominic Cummings, the former chief adviser, the man with the planet sized brain that Johnson thought he couldn't manage Downing Street without.

This is about the sale of Credit Suisse Bank (CS) to another Swiss bank, UBS with financial help in the way of guarantees from the Swiss government.

Note that Cummings seems to think Switzerland - not even a member of the EU and which still has its own currency - is in the eurozone with blame for CS's collapse blamed on 'eurozone institutions'.

They didn't have a clue in 2016 and still don't. 

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