Martin Kettle
Not only were the Brexiters clueless: they didn’t give a
stuff about Ireland. But this will come back to haunt the Tories
@martinkettle
Wed 6 Feb 2019 18.47 GMT Last modified on Thu 7 Feb 2019
01.04 GMT
‘Theresa May’s visit to Northern Ireland is part of a
forlorn effort to unite her party behind a tweaked withdrawal agreement that
still contains a backstop.’ May in Belfast on Tuesday. Photograph: Liam
Mcburney/AFP/Getty Images
Donald Tusk should be criticised not for his malice, but his
moderation. The European council president triggered a tsunami of confected
outrage from leavers today when he observed, with some justice, that there
should be a special place in hell for those who promoted Brexit without a plan.
But he should have said far more. He should have added that, within that
special place, there should be an executive suite of sleepless torment for
those politicians who promoted Brexit without ever giving a stuff about
Ireland.
Once again, Brexit is all coming down to Ireland. This was
always going to happen, and rightly so. Time after time in our history, Ireland
emerges as an awkward reality check that shames the fantasies of those who
think the British are better and that Ireland can be ignored. So there is
something both fateful and tragic about the fact Theresa May should have
prepared for the final showdown by having to make a rare visit to Ireland.
It wasn’t meant to be this way. For the Brexiters, the
leaving of Europe was never about Ireland at all. Brexit was about sovereignty,
about greatness, or about not liking too many foreigners living here. It was
about throwing off the yoke of Brussels and bringing back blue passports.
Ireland barely got a look-in during the debates of 2016, save when John Major –
yawn, yawn – and Tony Blair – hiss, boo – pointed out from lifetimes of
experience that Brexit would threaten the Northern Ireland peace agreements.
Their warnings fell on stony ground, except, not
irrelevantly, in Northern Ireland itself, where the majority voted to remain.
This was a deeply embarrassing outcome for the Brexiters. Surely a place that
wraps itself in the union jack so often would be full-hearted for a Brexit
project that did exactly the same? When the Northern Ireland voters failed to
oblige, the Brexiters did what fantasists do. They pretended that it hadn’t
happened. In this, they were of course assisted by May’s decision, after the 2017
election, to make a pact with the Democratic Unionists, the only important
Northern Ireland party to support leaving the EU.
Then came the backstop, designed to prevent a hard border,
which is now incorporated into the withdrawal agreement. The political intimacy
that has grown up in recent months between the Tory Brexiters and the DUP might
lead the unwary to assume they look at the issues in the same way. But they do
not, as the backstop repeatedly shows. It is an opportunists’ alliance, nothing
more, nothing less. It cannot and will not hold.
‘John Major and Tony Blair pointed out from lifetimes of
experience that Brexit would threaten the Northern Ireland peace agreements.
Their warnings fell on stony ground.’
The DUP hates the backstop because nationalists support it.
They pretend that it could cause regulatory divergence between Britain and
Northern Ireland – though they support divergence on issues such as criminal
law and some tax issues. They see Dublin’s hand at work everywhere. But the DUP
did not get where it is today by compromising with Irish nationalism. So, if
Sinn Féin and the SDLP in the north are in favour of the backstop, and if
Dublin is in favour too, then the DUP is hardwired to be against it. Their
position is tribal.
The Tory party’s Brexiters are not tribal so much as
fanatical. They are a mix of English nationalists and trade autonomists. They
hate the backstop because it gets in the way of their deregulatory obsession –
conveniently ignoring that the EU is in fact a free trade market. For the
Brexiters, the Irishness of the backstop is incidental. For the DUP it is everything.
While the DUP is trying to preserve Northern Ireland’s place in the UK, the
Brexiters dream of global conquest.
That is why May’s visit to Northern Ireland is part of a
forlorn effort to unite her party behind a tweaked withdrawal agreement that
still contains a backstop. In Belfast this week she gave the game away. “I’m
not proposing to persuade people to accept a deal that does not contain that
insurance policy for the future,” were her words. Today it became clear that
May is not relying on a technological fix on the border, not least because of
nationalist sensitivities. Northern Ireland businesses liked what they heard.
The Tory Brexiters did not. There were fresh calls to bin the backstop, and
renewed threats to vote down any deal of which it forms part. David Davis,
inevitably, said he’d be able to get things sorted quickly if he was in charge.
It would be foolish to assume May has no chance of
marshalling a narrow Commons majority behind some version of her EU deal next
week. But the odds remain long because she wants to do the right thing, more or
less, in Ireland. This has always divided the Tory party down the middle, since
the era of Robert Peel. And as Peel found out, it was difficult for a great
Tory leader, never mind a limited one.
In 1846, Peel came to the House of Commons to propose the
repeal of the corn law tariffs on imported grain. Much of his Tory party, which
represented landed interests in the areas where British grain was grown, would
have nothing to do with his plan. Peel was a pragmatist: he only became a
repealer because events demanded it. Those events were the Irish potato blight
and famine. The decision to repeal broke the Tory party for a generation.
Peel could, he admitted to MPs, have concealed the
seriousness of the situation in Ireland by “rousing the British lion or
adhering to the true blue colour”. But the suffering of four million people in
Ireland was too serious, and would only increase. Peel read out a series of
shocking eyewitness accounts. “It is absolutely necessary,” said Peel, “before
you come to a final decision on this question, that you should understand this
Irish case. You must do so.”
It was a speech his critics could have dismissed, if the
phrase had been in currency, as “project fear”. It was, in fact, project
national interest. Some time next week, May is going to face a similar
challenge. Britain in 2019 is not Britain in 1846. The issues faced by Peel and
May are very different. But Conservative MPs still face the same question – the
need to understand the Irish case.
• Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
Imagens do Dia / OVOODOCORVO
Tal como em Dante a viagem de Theresa May "trough hell" parece interminável ...
OVOODOCORVO
‘A special place in hell’: which Brexiters did Tusk have in
mind?
The leading contenders for the European council president’s
broadside
Jon Henley
@jonhenley
Wed 6 Feb 2019 18.34 GMT Last modified on Thu 7 Feb 2019
08.56 GMT
Donald Tusk, the president of the European council, has
speculated that there might be “a special place in hell” for those people who
promoted Brexit without having “even a sketch of a plan” for how to deliver it.
If he is right, who is most likely to end up roasting in the eternal fires?
David Davis
The former Brexit secretary David Davis was blissfully
ignorant of the EU’s workings.
David Davis: An ardent Brexiter from the first hour, Theresa
May’s bluff and blustering first Brexit secretary was nonetheless so blissfully
ignorant of the EU’s workings that he promised, a month before the referendum
in June 2016, that Britain would be able to negotiate individual trade deals
with Germany, France, Italy and Poland (the EU, as the government has since
learned, negotiates collectively). Within minutes of a vote for Brexit, Davis
predicted, German CEOs would be “knocking down Chancellor Merkel’s door
demanding access to the British market”. Davis also reckoned that within a
couple of years, “before anything material has changed, we can negotiate a free
trade area massively bigger than the EU”, blithely assuring the House of
Commons in October 2016 that there “will be no downside to Brexit, only a
considerable upside”. If you have “a good eye and a steady hand, it’s easy
enough”, he said. 4/5
Boris Johnson
The former foreign secretary Boris Johnson said the cost of
Brexit would be ‘virtually nil’.
Boris Johnson: One of the prime promoters of the sunlit,
unicorn-rich uplands that await once Britain has freed itself from the shackles
of an EU on the brink of collapse, the former foreign secretary pledged Brexit
would permit “continued free trade and access to the single market” while
allowing the UK to “take back control of huge sums of money, £350m a week, and
spend it on our priorioties such as the NHS”. The cost of leaving “would be
virtually nil, and the cost of staying would be very high”, he observed during
the referendum campaign. And of companies’ more practical concerns about the
possible impact on their bottom line, he reportedly remarked: “Fuck business.”
Brexit, Johnson proclaimed – quoting Shakespeare’s Brutus – was a time for
Britain “not to fight against the tide of history, but to take that tide at the
flood and sail on to fortune”. 5/5
Michael Gove
Michael Gove boldly assured referendum voters that Britain
‘can choose the path we want’.
Michael Gove: Three months before the referendum, the then
justice secretary – who recently conceded a no-deal, crash-out Brexit would be
catastrophic for Britain’s farmers – was boldly assuring voters: “The day after
we vote to leave, we hold all the cards and we can choose the path we want.” A
transition period would in fact be pointless, Gove argued in November that
year: “I am prepared to take the economic hit to secure the economic benefits
of not being in the single market and being outside the customs union. I simply
want … a quickie divorce.” 3/5
Liam Fox
Even a year after the referendum, Liam Fox was certain a
free-trade deal would be ‘the easiest in history’.
Liam Fox: Another true keeper of the Brexit flame untroubled
by anything as inconvenient as reality, the international trade secretary was
still blithely assuring anyone who cared to listen even a year after the
referendum that the free-trade agreement Britain would be able to strike with
the EU would be “one of the easiest in human history”. 3/5
Daniel Hannan
The Eurosceptic Tory MP Daniel Hannan had speculated about a
‘60% council tax cut’ after Brexit. Photograph: Alamy
Daniel Hannan: The Eurosceptic Conservative MEP and “Brexit
brain” has long been painting a rose-tinted picture of Britain’s departure from
the EU radically at odds with what has transpired since the vote. In May 2015,
for example, Hannan promised that nobody, “absolutely nobody, is talking about
threatening our place in the single market”. Without the UK’s contributions to
the EU budget, he was explaining a few months later, “we could give everyone a
60% council tax cut”. 4/5
Nigel Farage
Nigel Farage: The original Brexiter, the former Ukip
leader has been – in Tusk’s words – promoting Brexit without a plan pretty much
since he was first elected as an MEP in 1999. “The 23rd is our golden
opportunity – let battle be joined,” he trumpeted as his longed-for referendum
day was finally announced, explaining three days before the vote that the EU was
a “hopelessly outdated, stagnant, failed project” and leaving it would
instantly “revitalise our democracy”. Brexit would leave Britain absolutely
“free to cooperate and trade with our European neighbours”, Farage promised,
while “taking back control of our own destiny as a nation and being free to
blaze our own trail in the world”. Slogans aplenty, then. Detailed plans – not
so many. 5
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