Three aspects of overall Graun ideology on Brexit today. (er yesterday) First, hard-ball politcial realism:
Donald’s Trump special envoy to Northern Ireland has warned of the risk of creating a hard “border by accident” on the island of Ireland, as Boris Johnson’s newly drafted plan to rewrite the withdrawal agreement was rejected again by the EU.
The comments follow a critical intervention by the Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden, after the UK government published its internal market bill and admitted it would breach international law. “We can’t allow the Good Friday agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland to become a casualty of Brexit,” Biden tweeted...The speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, has also warned that Congress will refuse to ratify any UK-US trade deal that comes before it if the British government fails to abide by the terms of the withdrawal agreement.
Only one side is responsible for this risk, of course:
There are concerns that the failure of the UK to live up to its promise to enforce a regulatory and customs border in the Irish Sea could lead to the need for such checks to occur on the island of Ireland, a position that all sides are determined to avoid.
Those nice concerned, open and disappointed EC bureaucrats
[are now] examining two main options: taking the UK to the European court of justice [ha!] or continuing the negotiations and then presenting the British government with the choice of dropping the relevant clauses of the internal market bill in order to secure a trade deal or leaving without an agreement [sounds a bit perfidious to me] .
Then there is J Freedland :
Clueless about the US, uninterested in Ireland, Boris Johnson and his team are crashing on to rocks they can’t even see
[There is a] certain kind of Brexiter, the type who bangs on about “the Anglosphere”. These are folk who couldn’t wait to be shot of the continentals and embrace our true cousins across the Atlantic....That delusion was shattered once more this week, courtesy of a tweet from the Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden.
Biden is well, nice, cultured,as well as right:
Biden, a former chair of the Senate foreign relations committee, has had a decades-long interest in Ireland, anchored in the pride he takes in his own Irish ancestry. His speeches are peppered with the words of Irish poets; last month, he closed out his acceptance address at the Democratic convention by quoting Seamus Heaney. As a teenager, he worked on his stutter by reciting Yeats....on Capitol Hill, the real special relationship is not, as Tory nostalgists imagine, between the US and Britain, but between the US and Ireland.
the Brexiters may know their Frank Underwoods from their Jed Bartlets, but they have long failed to understand that no US-UK trade deal is ever going to happen unless the Irish dimension is resolved to Dublin’s satisfaction.
Gosh, he's got me there Frank Underwood? Jed Bartlet? OK I resign. No -- wait, the Graun has explanatory link to Wikipedia entries for the TV-avoiding members of the Islington set as well):
Fancis Joseph Underwood is a fictional character and the protagonist of the American adaptation of House of Cards...Josiah Edward "Jed" Bartlet is a fictional character from the American television serial drama The West Wing
Classic new petite bourgeoisie -- their cultural capital is both high and low, so they can always maintain superiority: if mentioning Yeats doesn't make you feel like an imposter, House of Cards will
Underneath is the deepest ignorance of all: the wilful refusal to see the conundrum that Brexit poses. Put simply, if the UK leaves the single market and the customs union, there has to be a meaningful border (and border checks) between the UK and the EU.
Sorry, but is it ignorance or wilful refusal? Ignorance in the UK npb sense of revealing one's humble origins in a gaffe? Thank goodness Freedland is able to put it all simply for us. Why didn't we hear this argument before? Or this, using typical and revealing Graun logic:
the failure to realise that ending the Troubles was possible only because Ireland and the UK were in the same supranational entity – thereby blurring the border between north and south, and allowing those in the north to identify as British or Irish or both.
So that's all it was! As soon as everyone was told by that nice T Blair that they now belonged to a wider supranational identty, [but not the UK, not the Christian community] the IRA and Protestant ultras put down their guns and made common cause Could they not be reunited now by reminding them both of the communal joys of watching West Wing, or supporting the Guardian?
Why Geoffrey Cox's A Man for All Seasons clip sends Brexit Britain a potent message
It is fascinating to find Sir Geoffrey Cox, the former attorney general, posting on Twitter a scene from Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons to affirm his belief in the sanctity of the law. Since Bolt was a one-time communist, an active supporter of CND and a dramatist who wrote a hagiographic portrait of Lenin in State of Revolution, he and Cox make strange bedfellows
In an attempt to engage the younger readers, this time there is an explainer -- but wouldn't it have been better to refer to a Stormzy track?
Cox’s choice of a clip from the film of A Man for All Seasons is highly pertinent but, to understand it fully, you need to know the context...More says: “This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast and if you cut them down do you think you could really stand upright in the winds that would blow then?” It’s a powerful message for today....[Cox] was speaking sentiments More might have understood....[The film]...started out as a stage play and is only one of many in the 20th century in which the individual is pitted against authority.
Billington, classically, thinks that the only people wanting to 'respect the
law' are people like him, nice, liberal, a bit luvvie. He should talk to
the all-knowing Freedland and maybe they could debate the
respect for the law in Irish politics.
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