EU Referendum


Brexit: there are perhaps madder things


11/06/2021




It's Matt Hancock's good (or bad) luck that his much-awaited select committee appearance has been upstaged by the G7 summit, the Biden-Johnson bilateral and the looming "sausage wars". The failure of Cummings to deliver any documentary evidence to support his accusations against Hancock has also robbed the session of much of its sting.

Nevertheless, there is still much to answer for on Covid, and especially on the care homes issue, where documentary evidence continues to come out of the woodwork, indicating that the NHS and the response system in general, was in disarray. This is a subject to which I must return.

For all that, it seems that a tale of unnecessary Covid deaths is not yet going to damage the government, or even Hancock, although there is time yet. Cummings has promised to deliver more information on the pandemic and his time at Number 10, turning himself into a campaigner for truth, justice and the right to wear non-matching socks.

In the meantime, we have the unusual situation where a Brexit-related story is actually vying with Covid for the front pages as the "sausages war" take on a new life with the potential intervention of Biden, alongside some entertaining, if somewhat unhelpful comments from Macron.

Fresh from being slapped by one of his less than devoted citizens, Macron is supposedly ramping up the pressure on Johnson by insisting that "nothing is negotiable" on the Northern Ireland Protocol. "I think it’s not serious to want to review in July what we finalised in December after years of work", he says. "It's not serious between us and it's not serious toward our people".

To that he adds, "I believe in the strength of treaties, I believe in serious work, nothing is renegotiable, everything is applicable", thereby demonstrating – and not for the first time – his less than sure grip on the subject.

For sure, les grandes lignes of the protocol cannot be changed easily, but everything is renegotiable, for a price – the price paid in political capital. And when it comes to details such as inspection frequencies and sausage bans, both the Withdrawal Agreement and the TCA are dynamic agreements. There is provision for ongoing adjustment via the Joint Committee and the Partnership Council, where there is scope for flexibility.

Mind you, if we were to heed the words of, Allister Heath, the all-knowing editor of the Sunday Telegraph, writing on 17 October 2019, there is no need for any flexibility. This great guru opined: "All Eurosceptics should back this deal - this is as good as it gets".

Johnson's deal, he gushed, "passes the smell test: it is a real Brexit, unlike Theresa May's shameful ersatz". It would "allow us to leave the EU, really and genuinely, and govern ourselves like every other independent nation in the world".

In a wave of enthusiasm for the work of the paper's favourite son, Heath added: "It doesn't seek to tie us down, or to keep us entangled permanently into the EU’s legal, political and commercial orbit. It provides for a real rupture for Great Britain, and a hybrid yet democratic deal for the special case that is Northern Ireland, in a way which is far better than a backstop". The deal was:
…more than merely tolerable or acceptable: it is remarkable in the circumstances. It is the best possible Brexit that any PM could realistically deliver in the face of this pro-Remain Parliament, the rigged constitutional stalemate and a scandalously hostile establishment. It is also the only certain way to achieve a real Brexit: another referendum could be calamitous.
And thus this towering giant of a man urged "all Eurosceptics to publicly back Johnson's deal at the earliest possible opportunity". He wrote as "a hard-core Brexiteer who opposed May’s nonsense all the way". This time it's different, he cautioned his beloved readers, "and, in practice, perhaps our last chance".

But how things change. Not two days ago, the very same Allister Heath was writing under the headline "The imperial EU is blind to the folly of its unequal Northern Ireland Brexit treaty", with the sub-heading: "The protocol isn't a just law. It was imposed on the UK by Brussels at the moment of our greatest weakness".

"Why don't the European elites ever learn lessons from history?", Heath demanded, his tone altogether different from those heady days 20 months previously. "It should be obvious", he stormed, "that the Northern Ireland Protocol, signed under duress by the UK, cannot last in its present state".

The "hybrid yet democratic deal for the special case that is Northern Ireland", had now morphed into a classic case of an "unequal treaty". This was the kind that China's Qing dynasty had been forced to sign with all of the imperial powers.

And the result was bitterness at a "century of humiliation" that continues to poison international relations to this day, and a sense of resentment which helped to usher in China's deplorable communist-nationalist regime.

This, in Heath's brave new world, the "only questions" are what replaces the protocol, how quickly and whether it is enough to restore the province's fragile balance and save the Good Friday Agreement. The idea, he says, "that the EU will be able to keep the protocol alive by threatening Britain with a trade war merely confirms the scale of Brussels's delusion".

It is at times like this when one wonders whether people such as Heath are even aware that there is such a thing as the internet, where ordinary human beings can call up the past words of the "great and the good" and compare them with current output.

The fate of a certain cricketer might have guided Heath as to the existence of such a thing but, having met the man, I am not sure that such mundane details could have percolated into his consciousness. "Leaders of Men", as we used to call them in less reverent days, are above such things. They are what they say, when they say it. There is no past, and certainly no room for compromise:
Brussels is asking for too much when it threatens sausage wars: no self-respecting sovereign state can accept this, nor, after years of listening to such nonsense, still believe the ridiculous excuse that "unsafe" British chilled meat products might "leak" into the supposedly sacrosanct European single market. So what if they do? Our sanitary regulations remain the same – and even if and when we choose to change them, it still wouldn't matter, or could be dealt with in other, more sensible ways. It is time to call the EU's bluff: its obsession with phytosanitary rules is merely an excuse to seek to detach Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK.
According to Heath, the UK had no real choice but to sign the protocol. It could either agree to a treaty that essentially handed away parts of Britain's sovereignty over Northern Ireland, or accept a no-deal Brexit that would have created unnecessary economic damage while still not resolving the Irish situation. The EU, says Heath, "wasn't acting rationally: it was set on kamikaze mode, committed to punishing Britain at any cost".

One can quite see the EU's problem here. If this combination of sublime ignorance, arrogance and sheer fantasy is reflected in the UK government's stance, there really is no way forward. Å efcovic might just as well seek out the nearest brick wall he can find, and engage in earnest dialogue with it.

But a Heath-like stance held by government might explain the Commission's otherwise incoherent offer of a "temporary veterinary agreement" as a means of reducing some of the border checks and easing the way for British bangers to enter Northern Ireland.

Given the complexity and the amount of detail that must be addressed, it is hard to see how such an option could be a quick solution or that, given the investment in time and energy needed to negotiate it and set it up, either party could then accept that such an agreement could be "temporary".

Presumably, on the basis that, whatever the EU offers the UK will refuse, it can offer an ostensibly attractive but entirely unrealistic solution in the knowledge that it will never have to implement it. That way, the Commission – with or without Macron – retains the high ground, leaving Johnson to argue the toss with Biden.

In this mad world, there are perhaps madder things. But with Johnson as prime minister, sanity is at a premium.

Also published on Turbulent Times.