London hasn’t yet pulled the trigger, or even fired a shot into the air, but it has broken the piggy bank, taken out the savings, and announced to the world that it intends to buy a gun; and Brussels has not plunged the sword, nor has it drawn, but has signed up for fencing classes. There is not yet a trade war between the United Kingdom and the European Union, but the scene of the duel has been chosen and the witnesses summoned.
Making good the threats that he had been launching to the four winds for weeks, Boris Johnson made official yesterday his intention to present to Parliament a law (or series of laws) that lays the foundations for the United Kingdom to unilaterally fail to comply with the aspects of Brexit that it does not he likes them, and that he believes they are detrimental to trade and internal stability in Northern Ireland. Although he negotiated them himself, he signed them and said they were “an “excellent solution”.
But the British Prime Minister himself (not only in this matter, but in all) has recognized that his philosophy is what is called pastelism here (gobble up all the pieces of the cake and pretend that it remains whole). Of things that most people have only one of (husbands, wives, lovers, cars, jobs, political opinions, about Brexit…), he has two or more. Only a dog, yes, called Dilyn and with which he is photographed as an electoral value.
Although the British already knew when they gave him the absolute majority that duplicity prevailed over Johnson’s intellectual honesty, they are now surprised that, with that mentality, he pretends that at the same time it is possible to print money and keep inflation at bay, raise taxes and that public spending remains controlled, impose severe restrictions on freedom of movement due to the pandemic and organize revelries in Downing Street.
Ditto ditto with Brexit. The agreements that he himself signed are now obsolete. And by announcing that he is going to introduce internal legislation to repeal some aspects of them –those that “distort trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland”–, he assured that this would not violate international law (a statement that provokes the laughter of the majority of legal experts). “This is not the law of the Medes and the Persians, but something that has to be adapted to empirical reality, and the reality is that they are not accepted by the Protestant community and therefore constitute a threat to the peace process, our priority number one,” said Foreign Office Secretary Liz Truss, who is selling herself as the new Margaret Thatcher.
The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), which came second in the recent Ulster regional elections, has blocked the constitution of the Government of the province, and has demanded that London break the Northern Ireland Protocol (the controls and measures that allow remain in the EU single market). Johnson, whose own Cabinet is divided on the matter and under pressure from the Biden Administration (the Irish lobby is very influential in Washington), has said that it is not about breaking it but changing it, unilaterally.
The response of the unionists has not been enthusiastic, and they have not said that they are going to accept being part of the Government and allow the functioning of the autonomous Assembly, but that they are going to think about it. They once insanely supported Brexit (against the will of most Northern Irish), believed Johnson’s promise that he would never allow the creation of a border in the Irish Sea (the controls that the goods from Great Britain), and the first thing the Prime Minister did was establish it. They stood bare-bottomed and have been punished at the polls by their own voters.
London and Brussels have been negotiating for some time how to iron out the rough edges of the protocol, and the positions do not seem so irreconcilable. It’s all a question of whether there is a green lane and a red lane at customs depending on whether the goods stay in Ulster or follow the Republic, whether English sausages are exempted from controls, whether the UK You can apply to Northern Ireland the VAT reductions you decide, whether pets can travel without vaccinations, health checks on New Zealand lamb…
It seems very technical, but for Johnson it is very political. That is, whether or not a trade war with the EU that would aggravate the cost of living problem but would serve a guilty party on a platter is convenient for them.
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