the European commission is expected to press the case to open “a technical office” in Belfast, three days after the government rejected an EU “mini-embassy” in the Northern Irish capital. ... The EU is refusing to drop the issue, amid fears Boris Johnson’s government could renege on the Brexit withdrawal agreement that requires Northern Ireland to follow EU single market and customs rules.
The protocol specifies UK officials are responsible for implementing EU law, but EU officials have the right to be present during any activities related to putting it into practice. It does not specify the right to an EU office....The government says it is ready to support ad hoc visits, but the EU argues it would be impractical for officials based overseas to be routinely flying in [they've never been one for unnecessary travel].
The Barnier crew might have scented an opportunity for obstruction since the recent Elections delivered more useful Northern Irish EU idiots:
A narrow majority of Northern Irish MPs, it has emerged, [now] back the EU plan for a Belfast office.
A Gove indiscretion seems not to have helped:
EU concerns about the British commitment to implementing the protocol escalated after Gove told the Brexit select committee on Monday that the joint committee was an opportunity to “develop” the protocol. The EU has always said the joint committee can only implement the withdrawal agreement.
A classic clash of political cultures again! At least Graun coverage is definitely improving. Normally there would have been much stronger support for any proposal from our European neighbours however blatantly and ideologically bureaucratic.
M Kettle seems to be consolidating his membership of the new petite bourgeoisie:
No 10 played the media brilliantly....many journalists [had begun] to question Johnson’s and the government’s continuing fragility...Then came the news of the birth
The wrong kind of personal seems to have become political in this case. M Barnier clearly needs to regain ground with a new baby, maybe with A Merkel?
It is still all a bit grudging:
the birth of his and his partner’s son now also vaults across much of the bitterness that many will always feel about his political career – a bitterness that, it is crucial to understand, large parts of the population do not feel towards Johnson in any way [who exactly is he addressing here, I wonder] ...Yet there is still something inescapably different about this particular prime ministerial birth. Johnson is a personality politician of a kind Britain has never known....Now he has done it again by becoming the first unmarried prime minister to have a child in No 10.[The Guarnida still cares about that?]
Baby Johnson is likely to be a much more public part of the Boris brand...The baby fits perfectly into [his] highly individual, iconoclastic form of “being” rather than “doing” leadership.
Gaurndistas who still want to drip on and on about 'Europe' must see the agenda slipping away from them. Maybe their morale is failing because they can't do solidarity-generating dinner parties any more and there are no demos in the cities?
On the one hand, he leads a government whose only serious purpose is to break Britain from the European Union and its regulatory regimes. On the other, it is a government held together by Johnson’s idiosyncratic mix of English nationalism, social liberalism and activist one-nation Toryism. Covid-19 has played to this latter version of the government, not the anti-regulatory, pro-Brexit version. With the pandemic and its consequences now so consuming, the idiosyncratic version – more than ever dependent on Johnson himself – is the one in the ascendant.
Then a rather Oedipal point to end:
Is there anyone out there who still thinks the role of the individual in politics is trivial when measured against the struggle of class against class, and the clash of historic forces [which might have been his marxist Dad's view]? Johnson’s career is a living and breathing negation of such thinking [no serious marxist would have any problem dismissing little Kettle's shallow analysis, of course]
No comments:
Post a Comment