This week in Brexitland, April 8, 2022

1. The Minister for Brexit Opportunities whips it out

Jacob Rees-Mogg gave an interview to Nick Ferrari on LBC this week and as ever with the Moggster, it revealed a great deal.

"The EU is very cross that we left and they want to make life as difficult as possible."

"If the EU, or member states of the EU, want to import these goods they will need to make it reasonable to do so and they have made some ameliorations to those rules since we finally left because they actually want to buy these goods and so it becomes market forces that determine the level of regulation."

There’s a lot about the pro-Brexit mentality you can learn from the quotes above. One is the victimhood that is inherent in it. Brexiters like to portray Remainers as crybabies, not able to get over the loss in a referendum six years ago now, but it is they who adopt the habit of the downtrodden most readily. “The EU is being mean to us and it’s not fair” is the only reasonable interpretation of this style of thinking by the Brexit faithful, and I find it difficult to think of a more childish stance than that on all of this.

Secondly, you get the British exceptionalism shining through. The demand on other countries to “make it reasonable” for British companies to sell into their markets. Rees-Mogg talks about “market forces” without seemingly realising an important point he’s brought up unintentionally - indeed, market forces are at play, most notably reminding us that when you create barriers to entry, you will undoubtably decrease the amount of custom that takes place in any marketplace. What Brexit did, although supposed free marketers such as Rees-Mogg remain blissfully ignorant of this fact, was to take power away from businesses, who while in the Single Market could trade as much as they liked across the free trade area in question, and handed it back to governments.

A fisherman named Robin called into the programme to make the point that his profession had been given a raw deal by Brexit (after a lot of promises by this government to the contrary) and he wanted Rees-Mogg to answer for why Britain leaving the EU had made it so much more difficult for British fishermen to ply their trade effectively. The minister for Brexit opportunities dismissed his fears out of hand using the usual rhetoric.

"I accept Robin's point that the EU is applying non-tariff barriers to make life difficult for British fishermen but that is because of the doctrine of the European Union, not because of the doctrine of the UK government."

Again, the fallout from Brexit is all the EU’s fault, not ours. They chose to be mean to us, which couldn’t have been foreseen. Of course, we were told that Britain held “all the cards”, which makes a mockery of the victimhood on display now from the likes of Rees-Mogg; beyond that, Britain chose to leave the EU if its own volition and all of the fallout from that move was entirely predictable. In fact, all of the downsides were given a name by the Brexiters themselves: Project Fear.

Rees-Mogg tried to make a point to Robin that although Brexit had sharply reduced the ways in which fishermen could sell their product, over time the terms of the trade deal with the European Union would greatly increase the amount of fishing waters available to British fishermen. One, this isn’t a helpful point in and of itself - if you were given twice the area from which to mine a product but still had almost nowhere to sell it, commercially speaking the increase in the volume of the good you can now produce is of very little help to you. But worse than that, Rees-Mogg’s claim isn’t even true in and of itself.

One of the continual reassurances given to fisherman by this government over the course of the trade negotiations conducted in 2020 with the EU was that a huge chunk of the existing EU quota in UK waters would return almost solely to British fisherman. 80% was talked about as a figure for a while - Farage even made getting a huge amount of the fishing rights back in exclusively British hands his Brexit “acid test”. What was the final deal? 25% of the waters return to Britain over five and a half years. That’s it. So, no Robin, you aren’t getting a lot more water to fish in any time soon, whatever Jacob Rees-Mogg tries to tell you on the matter.

To summarise, Rees-Mogg is treating Partygate and Brexit in exactly the same way - as disasters to be minimised by a combination of downplaying their importance overall and shifting the residual blame he can’t entirely eliminate elsewhere.

The fishermen have got a raw deal out of Brexit? Well, it’s the EU’s fault and anyhow, “The world has moved on”. Every problem created by Brexit either does not exist or if it does, it’s not our fault. And he gets away with this because people are so exhausted by the arguments over Brexit, they have no energy left to try and hold the largest change to how Britain conducts its matters since the end of the war to anything approaching a reasonable level of account.

2. The latest on the never-ending idiocy of the DUP

At a time when Putin’s army is murdering people in cold blood in Ukraine and Viktor Orban has just won bigger than ever before in Hungary, you have to take political solace where you can. And nothing makes me feel at least a little bit better about the state of world politics - and I do mean, nothing else comes close to making me feel as good about it - than watching the machinations of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party and then laughing until I cry. Their continual self-immolation provides me with a seemingly never ending sense of joy and hope.

At every turn, the currently largest Unionist party in the nation say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing, not just for themselves but for their avowed aim of keeping Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom. There’s that old saying about how if you want to understand the motives of those running an organisation, it’s best to try and imagine that they are enemies trying to destroy it from within. This axiom has never applied better to any organisation than to the current DUP.

With the Northern Ireland Assembly election now less than a month away, their leader, Jeffrey Donaldson, has had to pop up and say a few words in an attempt to stop Sinn Fein from winning - something that would have been unthinkable pre-Brexit - and even halt their slide from the top spot amongst Unionist parties. What have this band of unreliable screw ups had to say for themselves then in the heat of the moment? Sit back, grab some popcorn and enjoy.

First off, sample this tasty morsel from the Belfast Telegraph:

“Sir Jeffrey Donaldson has declined to apologise for anything which the DUP has done over recent years, insisting that the problems with how Brexit unfolded were the fault of other parties.

“Speaking to the Belfast Telegraph as the party launched its Assembly election campaign, the DUP leader said that “Brexit is a national issue” and that his party had fought for Northern Ireland at Westminster by blocking Theresa May and Boris Johnson’s proposals until losing their position as kingmakers in the Commons.”

Okay, a lot to unpack there, after you stopping laughing enough to throw up. What they did indeed do that’s listed there by Donaldson is greatly help to block Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement. You know, the one that would have meant all Brexit outcomes would have affected the whole of the United Kingdom as one, not single out Northern Ireland for any special treatment ever, thereby treating the Union as sacred. Yeah, they not only prevented all that from happening, they aided the Tory right in ousting May from Number 10 altogether.

They then trusted Boris Johnson when he first came to office - only to see him shaft them almost immediately by agreeing to put a customs border down the Irish Sea. They then threatened to collapse the Northern Ireland Executive as a result on multiple occasions, never ending up doing so, making them look even sillier than they usually do.

This did not stop Donaldson from making yet another empty threat.

“I am very clear, until these issues are resolved, then I can’t see that there’s a basis for forming an executive that is required to implement the protocol.”

Jeffrey, the UK government can just impose their rule on the nation and carry out the requirements of the protocol themselves, something it seems you haven’t taken the time to work out. This idea that if there’s no NI Executive, the Westminster government are going to be forced to drop the NI Protocol altogether is deep, deep DUP fantasy stuff.

But I still haven’t got into the funniest thing the DUP leader had to say for himself this week, the very first quote I pulled around Brexit and the NI Protocol and it being everyone’s fault other than the Democratic Unionist Party. Yes, Jeffrey, if only your party had been in prime position to make demands for Northern Ireland, like say, a hung parliament in which the DUP held the balance of power. If only that had taken place, maybe everything would be different, huh?

The Tories played the DUP for absolute mugs and got away with it. Blokes like Jeffrey Donaldson are still coming to terms with this, with as I say, generally hilarious results. All I can say to Donaldson and his party is, please, I beg of you, keep it up. We all need something to make us smile at a time of such global despair.

Thank you to all my regular readers and of course to first time onlookers as well. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please do - here’s a link to the site if you need it:

nicktyrone.substack.com

And as always, I will be back next week with the very worst of Brexit.