This week in Brexitland, January 28th, 2022
When Unionists in Northern Ireland start unconsciously attacking the Union, you know we’ve really hit rock bottom
Given how little attention Northern Ireland is given in the English media, some of you may not even know who Edwin Poots is. He was the leader of the DUP for about five minutes last year before becoming the Agricultural Minister under the new, current leader Jeffrey Donaldson. The reason I bring up Poots here is that he has been busy trying his best to throw a wrench into the guts of the NI Protocol. His approach to this has involved attempting to get the Stormont executive to have to give formal approval to the checks required by Boris Johnson having put a customs border down the Irish Sea.
What this is really about is making how the NI Protocol works a matter for the government of Northern Ireland alone, challenging the ability of the UK government to make decisions that affect all of Brexit-related policy. After all, the NI Protocol is what allowed Brexit to practically happen, so any changes to it would affect our entire relationship with the EU. Sinn Fein blocked this move, meaning Poots and his party needed to consider what came next.
And what they are flirting with, openly, is just suspending the checks anyhow. In other words, since the DUP essentially control the levers of powers in the relevant areas, why not just shut the whole thing down anyhow, without approval from the power sharing executive? Just de facto decide that the GB-NI customs border doesn’t exist? What’s so strange about all this, if you haven’t got there already, is that senior Northern Irish Unionists are seemingly unconsciously challenging the whole idea of the Union itself. They have sought to take something Westminster had decided and bring the decision making around the competency in question back to the island of Ireland. I don’t know, it seems to me that when you’re essentially calling for Home Rule for Northern Ireland, which is what they are doing in all but name, you’re sort of retreating from the whole idea of a United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as a concept. Without fully thinking it through, it seems like the DUP is going through a version of wanting to destroy the Union to save it.
In a sense, I don’t blame the DUP for getting confused on these sorts of matters. After all, they were so certain Johnson had their best concerns at heart, at least before he did the inevitable and sold them down the river to get Brexit ‘done’. Still, they might want to think about what they actually want to achieve here. Hate the NI Protocol though they do - and I get why they do - perhaps arguing for competencies to be taken away from Westminster and given to Stormont is creating a trend that isn’t great for their overall project in the long run. Particularly given their threat to the UK government seems to be, and maybe I’ve got this wrong but it’s what it sounds like to me: we’ll give you a few more weeks but after that, we’ll pull out of the power sharing agreement altogether. All right then, so you want the UK government to do something, and in order to incentivise them to achieve it in the timeframe you’ve invented, your threat is to give away every last morsel of power you currently own if they don’t do it on time. Basically, give in to my demands or I’ll jump off this bridge. There is probably something in there about the whole of Brexit, but I digress.
If what the DUP really want deep down is for Northern Ireland to be governed from Whitehall as part of a United Kingdom, they need to take the good with the bad, even the NI Protocol. Either that or consider whether they really like the Union as much as they claim to, and in turn wonder why it was Sinn Fein who blocked their move to take a competency away from a Tory-led Westminster government, who for their own reasons were trying to halt the DUP from enacting something which gives Northern Ireland massive distance from the policy goals of the United Kingdom.
Why are libertarian types so keen on not only Brexit but the power of national governments?
A great mystery, at least on the surface of it all, is why libertarians more than any other ideological group are so pro-Brexit. At least, if you look at the reality of Brexit in practice.
British individuals lost a lot when we left the European Union. Your right to live in the EU without a visa is gone, as you can only stay 180 days out any given year and can’t work without a visa now. In fact, working anywhere in the EU post-Brexit is much more complicated and out of the hands of individuals, having been put into the arms of large corporations and various state actors to decide, something you’d think libertarians would dislike.
Brexit added layers of paperwork for British companies should they wish to trade with any European country, with loads of the kinds of red tape libertarians are supposed to hate being the direct result of Brexit. Without question, if the only passport you own is a UK one, you have less individual freedom than you had before Brexit. Perhaps you don’t value those freedoms that were lost, perhaps you do, but libertarians should surely care about the loss of individual freedoms for anyone, particularly when it comes alongside an increase in state power.
The answer to all this that the libertarian Brexiters always come back with is the importance of ‘sovereignty’. This is much derided in Remainer circles on principle but it’s worth digging a touch deeper and asking the following questions: why do libertarians, of all people, like the idea of national governments getting more power? Why would people who see state power as the source of all evil champion something like Brexit which increases and centralises the power of the state? And why do libertarians openly celebrate that increase in power more than anyone else?
I suppose you could conclude that libertarianism is an ideology that doesn’t entirely work in reality; like socialism, it sort of disintegrates on contact with reality, and for the same basic reason. They are both utopian in nature and make no allowances for how reality really operates. It’s still strange, however, and evidence of the fact that even people who spend all of their time telling other people to think for themselves don’t think for themselves very much.
No end in sight for the queues at Dover, as the government scrambles to blame them on anything and everything apart from Brexit
Ah, the queues of lorries at Dover. What will no doubt come to be the symbol of Brexit when it is discussed in history classes with great national embarrassment 30 years from now. We see the government who made them happen desperately trying to divert blame away from their still sacred project. Almost every week, someone from the Conservative party has to explain why something that is obviously Brexit-related is not in fact Brexit-related.
This week it was Transport Secretary Baroness Vere who was asked about the whole thing in a select committee meeting. She blamed the lorry queues on…..well, let’s make this fun. Have a guess. Was the non-Brexit related reason given for queues of lorries in Kent:
There has been a staff shortage at the port, resulting in the checks taking longer than usual
There has been increased suspicion of terrorist activity near Dover, resulting in heavier checks being needed than would normally be the case
Ferry maintenance is the issue, with three ships being refitted at the moment
A mouse got caught in the wheel of one of the lorries and it has taken days to get it out again
You probably think it’s either one or two, which at least sound semi-plausible, but no, it’s reason three. Yes, they are a few ferries down and this is causing all the grief, apparently. You have to wonder what excuse they’ll come up with when the “three ships” one becomes out of date, but this isn’t a government that has ever worried about the future, even the near-future. They have yet to meet a bridge they won’t cross when they come to it.
Meanwhile, back in reality, everyone else has figured out Brexit is the main culprit here. By “everyone” I mean the unions who represent the lorry drivers, any trade specialist who isn’t of the Brexit religion, government insiders (off the record, obviously) and even the port of Dover itself, albeit in more reserved tones, sighting the new GVMS as one major issue amongst others. As ever, what the Brexiters hope is that something magical will come and take the problems created by Brexit away, be that some piece of technology that hasn’t been invented yet or something even more esoteric than that. In the meantime, there’s always the mouse getting caught in the lorry wheel to use next time out as an excuse.
Thank you once again for tuning in. I’ll be back next week with the worst of Brexit over the next seven days - until then please subscribe if you haven’t done so already.