It took a while, but I finally noticed one of those “Brexit opportunities” quoted as Cabinet Minister Jacob Rees-Mogg. Thanks to the UK leaving the UK, the British government has given us an obvious bottomless supply of industrial nonsense.
I use the term in the sense distilled by the eminent philosopher Harry Frankfurt, whose best-selling treatise On Nonsense defines it as a speech intended to persuade without regard to the truth. As long as your main liar is interested enough in the truth to hide it, the nonsense dealer doesn’t care if their words are true or false, as long as the listener is convinced. Indifference to the facts is a major feature. The Brexit project has always been full of nonsense – £ 350 million from the side of the bus could have come straight from Frankfurt’s essay – so it’s no surprise that this Brexit government has become a global producer of these things.
His latest batch is related to the Northern Ireland Protocol, which the government says “fundamentally undermines” the Good Friday agreement, which brought peace to the countryside after three decades of murderous war. The Democratic Unionist Party, which is struggling to leave in 2016 – even when Northern Ireland voted to stay 56% to 44% – so despises the protocol, it refuses to take its place in Belfast’s decentralized institutions until it disappears. . The Minister of Northern Ireland, Connor Burns, waved a large pile of documents in front of the cameras, showing the huge amount of documents that the protocol requires simply to move goods between Northern Ireland and Great Britain.
Who, the unsuspecting spectator wonders, could be responsible for such a disgusting measure? What authority, bad or stupid, has imposed on Boris Johnson and his government a protocol that makes business impossible, thwarts self-government in Northern Ireland and threatens peace?
The answer, of course, is Boris Johnson and his government. As he and his ministers know, none of this was imposed on them by an “alien force,” as Rees-Mogg puts it. On the contrary, the protocol was invented, praised and then passed into law by Johnson, his ministers and his deputies. They want to blame the Europeans by pretending that brutal Brussels is so indifferent to Northern Ireland and its extremely delicate position – but it is entirely up to them.
They hope that most of us will have forgotten how this situation came about; and it is quite true that the British have an ignoble tendency to forget when it comes to Ireland. But not so long ago. Since the Conservative Party was inclined to a firm Brexit, which led the United Kingdom out of both the customs union and the single market, this meant that there would have to be a border marking the external border of these bodies.
Most could see that this border could not be on the island of Ireland, dividing the republic from the north, without reopening the wounds of the Problems. This left only one possibility: Northern Ireland will keep some of the old European arrangements and the border will run along the Irish Sea. But that would set Northern Ireland apart from the rest of the United Kingdom, striking a direct blow at the defining credo of trade unionism: that Northern Ireland and Britain are one.
No British prime minister would do such a thing, said Theresa May. “Under no circumstances,” Johnson agreed in July 2019. But a few months later, he broke that promise. He did so in order to reach a deal with the EU, to claim that he was “ready to bake” and to win general elections on that basis. Which he did properly.
Even at that time, official government documents showed how this new deal would lead to the border checks themselves, which Johnson now describes as unacceptable. A senior mandarin had patiently explained everything to the prime minister in detail. But he couldn’t care less, this employee tells me. All that mattered was to be able to say that the deal was done. Johnson thought he would deal with the consequences later. After all, it was only Northern Ireland. And so here we are.
But the problem is not in the protocol itself, ministers say. It’s all about the way Brussels implements it. This does not wash away: any border down the Irish Sea, no matter how gently treated or lightly imposed, would undermine this defining member of the trade union faith. But to say that a light touch implementation would have helped was all the UK government wanted. If that were true, then London would be engaged in the slow, patient work of diplomacy and negotiation, “refining the technical details,” as one former negotiator puts it. But it didn’t. Instead of welcoming moves from the other side, he preferred to show off, threatening to blow everything up. He now says he will “repeal” the protocol altogether, refusing to abide by what he agrees to.
That, May said, would destroy Britain’s international reputation in one fell swoop: The United Kingdom would be a fraudulent state and its signature useless. It will also provoke revenge on the EU, sparking a trade war that would cost British business dearly, just as the country is in the grip of a cost-of-living crisis.
From the very beginning, this question involved magical thinking: do you remember the mythical “alternative arrangements” that would somehow make the border disappear into thin air? Six years after the referendum, the nonsense about Brexit continues to come. Only today, Reese-Mogg suggested that one of the advantages of Brexit is the ability to overcome the shortage of truck drivers – when Brexit made this shortage so much worse. He said that “The economic benefits of Brexit… come all the time” when street dogs know that Brexit has hit trade hard in the UK, as barriers between us and our largest, closest market always stand. it would happen. Reese-Mogg toured broadcasting studios to announce a new initiative to cut 90,000 jobs in the civil service – apparently hoping to forget that the government recently told us it needed to hire another 50,000 people to handle, you guessed it, Brexit documents.
When we were in the EU, we had to fight with oil mountains and wine lakes. Now that we are outside, we are facing a much uglier stain on the national landscape: a huge and growing pile of nonsense. And it smells.
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Jonathan Friedland is a Guardian columnist
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He will join an online Guardian Live event on June 21 to discuss the life of Rudolf Vrba, a young man who fled Auschwitz and helped save more than 200,000 lives. Book tickets here
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