This week in Brexitland, March 11th, 2022

1. The question of the EU, Ukraine and the “return of nationalism”

This week, Dan Hannan wrote a piece for the right-wing American outlet, The Washington Examiner, entitled “Ukraine has made nationalism cool again”, which is an interesting look into the current state of the Brexiter mindset. Like the ancients needed to make Earth the centre of the universe and warped any evidence to the contrary around this central conceit, so too must everything in the minds of the Leavers revolve around the luminescence of Brexit.

The second sentence of the article gives away the essential thesis on display here: “They understand, as Ukrainians themselves have long understood, that the things they value, including uncensored newspapers, human rights, the rule of law, and personal freedom, depend on being able to hire and fire your own lawmakers.” In other words, you can’t have these things if you enter into any sort of supranational membership type arrangements, such as, I don’t know, the European Union.

This of course can be disproven in two obvious and insurmountable ways. One is that we had uncensored papers, human rights, rule of law and personal freedom the whole time we were in the European Union. If Hannan’s hypothesis is that you cannot have those things without “being able to hire and fire your own lawmakers”, either this sentence does not apply to the EU - which one senses Hannan himself would believe that it does, although this is guess on my part - or the UK’s own experience of membership disproves this theory.

The second is that there are loads of supranational membership organisations that I’m pretty sure Dan Hannan would approve of, including NATO and the WTO. When a country joins NATO, it gives up a slice of its sovereignty. It can no longer completely decide which wars to engage in and which to avoid - if one NATO country is attacked, it is an attack on all and action is required of all members. Countries give up this bit of sovereignty because the advantages of being in NATO are so big. Sort of like the advantages available when a country is in the world’s largest single market, as a for instance.

Hannan’s article doesn’t touch on the idea of nationalism versus patriotism and how they can be different, or the negatives of nationalism, even to those who love their respective countries. It focuses instead on a narrow definition of all of these things in which “nationalism = patriotism = moral goodness = Ukraine”. What Dan Hannan’s article fails to mention, even in passing, is that the man leading the Ukraine in this fight against tyranny, as well as the majority of his countrymen, want to join the EU as soon as possible. They see it as part of an alignment with the west, pushing further away from Russia. They also see the economic benefits of being in the European Union, which would be huge for Ukraine. But vitally in relation to Hannan’s paean to the joys of nationalism, Zelensky and his fellow Ukrainians do not see joining the EU as any threat to their sovereignty. That’s because they know what real loss of sovereignty is, having experienced it first-hand.

Zelensky understands that real loss of sovereignty means being ruled by a sock puppet who is both acting on behalf of a foreign power pretty much completely, and using the power held in order to asset strip the country. Frankly, it bears no comparison to having to co-ordinate light bulb luminosity with 27 other countries so that trade can be as free as possible - at least, not to someone who has faced real oppression.

This reminds me of the fundamental problem with libertarianism - this idea that the individual (or country) can be completely and totally free somehow, when in fact every person (or nation) is hemmed in by the world in many different ways, regardless of how open a society they live in. Everyone has to trade some level of responsibility for the freedoms that they have. Conservatives used to understand this intrinsically, but because Brexit runs against this uncomfortably, it’s been chucked aside. Give us total freedom, total sovereignty. No supranational organisations! Except for NATO, that’s fine. Oh, and the WTO. And we quite like the Catholic Church, now that we’re making a list here. Actually, we just don’t like the EU for our own, bizarre reasons and it really has nothing to do with other supranational membership organisations. Or nationalism, for that matter, however “cool” is has sudden become with the advent of Zelensky’s super-celebrity.

2. As Ukraine burns, the UK persists in their phony fight with the EU over the Northern Ireland Protocol

Rightly lost amongst the news of Putin’s military forces bombing children’s hospitals is the fact that meetings between the UK and the EU on the subject of the NI Protocol are still ongoing. This now seem bizarre and out of place in the new world we’re living in; while the UK government makes big noise about being on the front foot in terms of uniting the west against Putin’s invasion, they are continuing with a battle against the EU - which represents a rather large chunk of the west - that has been nasty tempered at times throughout its brief history.

It’s all but been confirmed that the government will not have anything to do with Article 16 invocation this side of the May elections - and it’s difficult to see them doing it after that if the war in the Ukraine is still dragging on by that point. It’s tricky to talk about the importance of western unity while picking a scrap with a very large portion of it over something that, compared to what’s happening in Ukraine, seems nit-picky and relatively unimportant.

Of course, what makes the whole Article 16 saga so dreary is that this whole conflict is completely fake, done for show, a pantomime for Daily Mail readers and Tory activists. No one who has any idea of what they are doing inside of government seriously believes that, other than through some bizarre, outrageously rare fluke, anything is going to seriously change in Northern Ireland without the UK being proactive, ie moving closer to the EU in terms of agreed, shared standards, enshrined in law. This idea that the EU is going to cave in to unreasonable demands is ridiculous considering 1). the NI Protocol is the only plausible solution to the problems created on the island of Ireland through the Brexit the government sought and thus is extremely important to the whole of the EU and 2). this strategy didn’t work during the trade negotiations, when the UK figured if it stamped its feet it would eventually get its way, only to end up with not very much, the EU conceding very little ground on anything, so why would it work now?

The UK government should just lay this battle to rest right now. Use the situation in Ukraine to bury this piece of bad news. The NI Protocol isn’t going to change in any way unless the British government is willing to make concessions. Now is not the time to be discussing all of this anyhow. Let’s focus on western unity in the face of Putin’s aggression and nitpick the “oven ready" deal” at a better time.

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See you next week for more of the worst of Brexit.