We are certainly living through strange times. The intervention yesterday by Sir Geoffrey Cox, Johnson's former Attorney General, was quite extraordinary. He has written in The Times and extracts are used in The Spectator and he says he will vote against the UK Internal Market bill as it stands at the moment. It almost certainly now means the bill will be amended, although only to give parliament the right to approve of Britain breaking international law. Whether that will be enough to satisfy the EU and the US remains to be seen.
Cox recognises that we are going to have to live with the consequences of the Withdrawal Agreement and not seek to wriggle out of our commitments through illegality.
Perhaps the most important statement in his article is this:
"Those manifest consequences included the inevitable application of EU tariffs and customs procedures to certain goods entering Northern Ireland from Great Britain and of the EU’s state aid regime to the province. There can be no doubt that these were the known, unpalatable but inescapable, implications of the agreement. They included a duty to interpret and execute both the agreement and the protocol in good faith."
"...if the powers that the House of Commons is asked today to confer on the government by assenting to the UK Internal Market Bill are to be used to nullify those perfectly plain and foreseeable consequences, they would amount to nothing more or less than the unilateral abrogation of the treaty obligations to which we pledged our word less than 12 months ago, and which this parliament ratified in February."
He says it would be "unconscionable" for Britain to act in such a way.
It comes over more strongly since he calls himself a Brexiteer "to the core" and he cannot be labelled a remoaner. Yet it doesn't occur to him that it is Brexit itself which is in the dock - or at the very least Johnson's interpretation of it.
If a government's policy risks destroying the nation it governs is it the right policy? If the policy demands law breaking in order to achieve its aims, is it the right policy? Cox doesn't ask himself these questions and presumably is perfectly relaxed about the people of NI being separated from the rest of the UK via a sea border. It will bring about the unification of Ireland and probably Scotland's independence, too.
What sort of government is it that embarks on such a policy? The former AG is happy with all of that, it's just the law breaking he doesn't like.
We shall see what happens later today during second reading of the bill.
I caught a tweet by The New European yesterday about an interview given by Michel Barnier:
Michel Barnier says he will ‘never yield’ to Brexiteers attempting to ‘destroy’ the EU https://t.co/WPYLpiwMpJ— The New European (@TheNewEuropean) September 12, 2020
At the end of the article it links to there is a wonderful vignette about Farage:
At the end of the interview, Barnier told an interesting story. Some day after the 2016 referendum, Nigel Farage asked to visit him at his office in Brussels.
“I welcomed him at some length,” Barnier says, “and I asked him: ‘Mr Farage, now that you won the referendum on Brexit, how do you see the future relations between the UK and the EU ?’ Farage answered in a smile: ‘But Mr Barnier, when Brexit happens, the EU will no longer exist!’”
At this point in our interview, Barnier turned to the audience. On his face, normally so calm, was passion. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he declared solemnly, “we need to stay together to defend our interests in the world, without shame. Neither the Chinese, nor the Russians, nor the Americans have shame when defending theirs.”
As a conclusion, he added: “Ladies and Gentlemen, you have to know: these people – not all the Brexiteers, not all those who voted Brexit, but these people – they want to destroy us.
“They want us to blow up from the inside. I tell you, as long as I have strength, we’ll stand in their way. We won’t yield an inch to those people. Never.”
He received a standing ovation.
I am sorry to say I have heard this sort of thing before. Leaving the EU is, for many hard Brexiteers, not the main point of Brexit at all. It is the destruction of the EU as an entity. One can almost see Putin's hand in all of it. OK he didn't start euro scepticism but he has weaponised it against Europe.
Farage actually believed that Brexit would hasten the downfall of Brussels. In fact it has strengthened the EU immeasurably. Britain meanwhile is descending into chaos as it tries to make sense of the 2016 referendum. The Irish sea border is just the first step on the road to reality. The government is becoming more isolated as it tries to 'get Brexit done'.
