Tuesday 22 October 2024

Slippery Gove absolves himself over Brexit and the Irish border

Michael Gove, the new editor of The Spectator, has been interviewing Arlene Foster, the former leader of the DUP, about Brexit. He is the slipperiest of slippery characters and not averse to rewriting history when it suits him. Brexit has been an unmitigated disaster as most people in this country now accept. Even Kemi Badenoch who could become Tory leader on 2 November, admits as much when she declares the problem with Brexit is that they embarked on the project without a plan. This, remember, was the greatest upheaval in trade and our constitutional settlement for a couple of centuries.

Gove's excuse, since he can't argue they had no plan, is to say they did have a plan, but it was the wrong one.  

In a BBC podcast, Surviving Politics, Gove and Foster heap the blame on Mrs May for succumbing to EU pressure to “accept a set of provisions” designed to ensure there was “no border on the island of Ireland” something Foster describes as “a mistake.”

Gove says he and Johnson had “reservations” but he decided to "give her the benefit of the doubt” having expressed “one or two concerns” about the proposal. Gove said he should have been more "robust" with the then PM and that she didn’t need to “accept the premise of what the EU were asserting” with regard to having two different customs and regulatory areas in Ireland.

Foster says there are borders inside the EU and there were “solutions” that neither of them bothered to outline. There is no acceptance that the Irish border was unlike any other border because of the political and historical issues that we know about all too well. I crossed the old border a few times when it was manned by heavily armed British soldiers and it was an intimidating process at the best of times.

They are still going around in circles trying to resolve the Northern Ireland trilemma that posits you could only ever have two of the following three:

  • No land border
  • No customs border in the Irish sea
  • Brexit

The issue is never addressed by either of them. The EU rejected all the madcap schemes put forward by various members of the Brexit cult not because they wanted to be awkward or punish Britain but because they were simply unworkable. Foster said they already had a monetary border on the island but neglects to mention that we also had freedom of movement of capital by virtue of EU membership.

In any case, nothing they say to try and justify their own personal positions goes anywhere near acknowledging that the whole idea of wanting to avoid a hard border came not from the EU, but from Theresa May’s Article 50 letter dated 29 March 2017.

You can tell how badly Brexit is going when people who were at the very centre of events post 2016 trying to to present themselves as innocent victims.  The trilemma was known about very early on - that's why Mrs May addressed it in the A50 letter, yet even now Gove and Foster can't accept the protocol and now the Windsor Framework, was the only solution.

Moldova

Moldova voted narrowly in a referendum on Sunday to join the EU. There is quite a lot of evidence of Russian interference gathered by the Moldovan authorities and confirmed by the BBC.

Moldova’s pro-Western President Maia Sandu has accused Russian-organized networks of bribing approximately 300,000 people to vote for pro-Russian candidates in the recent presidential election and against membership of the EU.

Squeezed between Romania and Ukraine, Moldova only has a population of 3 million with about half being of voting age. Apparently, the Russians managed to offer bribes to 300,000, roughly 20% of the electorate.

They failed on the EU issue, but only by a fraction of a percent and now the Kremlin are suggesting the referendum and the election was somehow not free and fair!  This takes a bit of chutzpah since the Russians have never held any free and fair elections at any time in their entire history.

The Moldovan presidential election hasn't quite finished since Sandu didn't get the required 50% and now faces a difficult run-off against her pro-Putin opponent.  Georgia has its own EU referendum in a few days. Look out for more interference there.

We know the Russians helped Trump in 2016 since this is all in the Mueller report.  They hacked Hilary Clinton's emails for example and released then via Assange and his Wikileaks organisation and there were numerous contacts between Trump campaign staff and the Russians.

Despite all this it seems to be an accepted fact by the British authorities that Russia did not meddle in the 2016 referendum.  They had both the means and the motive and the weakening of the European Union was a central plank of Putin's foreign policy goals. We know Aaron Banks and his sidekick Andy Wigmore had many more meetings with the Russian ambassador than they admitted to because a high court judge said so.

We still don't know why Nigel Farage visited Julian Assange when he was holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in March 2017.

What is happening at the moment is nothing short of Russia using western democracy against itself. They enlist greed, apathy and the apolitical and recruit people who only think about their immediate personal gratification or have a visceral dislike of foreigners or others.  Anything that can be exploited on social media.

Putin recognises how fragile and open to manipulation western democracies are. It's not even very expensive to get involved either. But also, a genuine election victory in a democracy confers a lot of power on the winner no matter what sort of jiggery pokers was involved in the process. To challenge the result is normally anathema, we just don't do it. 

It’s tantamount to challenging the whole democratic process. But we now need to start calling it out before all faith is lost in democracy itself. 

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