Opinion

Brian Feeney: Boris Johnson's bill is a sign of weakness and desperation

Brian Feeney

Brian Feeney

Historian and political commentator Brian Feeney has been a columnist with The Irish News for three decades. He is a former SDLP councillor in Belfast and co-author of the award-winning book Lost Lives

Boris Johnson has deployed Trump-like brashness
Boris Johnson has deployed Trump-like brashness Boris Johnson has deployed Trump-like brashness

If you’re under forty you won’t remember the constant virulent abuse the British tabloid press heaped on Jacques Delors, President of the European Commission 1985-95.

Delors successfully pushed through the EU Single Market, the Single European Act and Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), the first two strongly supported by Margaret Thatcher.

For anti-EU Conservatives, then a growing fringe group of fanatics, Delors was the devil incarnate assaulting Britain’s place in the world, trying to suck the country into a United States of Europe. Delors shrugged it off. He knew what was going on. He accurately described the turmoil in British politics about relations with the EU as a ‘psycho-political problem’ for Britain. Many English especially found it impossible to come to terms with the country’s diminished role in the world. So it remains.

The main difference now, twenty-five years on, is that the lunatics are in charge of the asylum. They live in a fantasy world where they can run a ‘sovereign state’, totally independent in every respect from outside obligations, just like what British history texts call the era of ‘splendid isolation’ in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

What we are witnessing during the last four years is this fantasy world of an imaginary past repeatedly colliding with reality. The first example was in December 2017 when Theresa May ratted on a deal struck with the European Commission about the British border in Ireland within forty-eight hours of agreeing it. The fundamental position has never changed since then. May tied herself in knots trying to be both inside the European single market and not inside at the same time in her ridiculously convoluted Chequers deal, but it wouldn’t wash. Brexiteers swapped her for a true believer in the fantasy.

This year reality finally dawned on the British. Perhaps it was slow because they have no experienced trade negotiators but instead rely on loyal, often ignoramus Brexiteers, to make the case. As Lord Patten said, the only experience Brexiteers have of trade deals is at the check-out in Waitrose. You can’t leave the single market and customs union, and also maintain a UK single market if you’ve signed a Withdrawal Agreement (WA) leaving the north of Ireland in the EU single market. Since February that’s UK law which Johnson extolled as “an excellent oven-ready deal” to win last December’s election.

Johnson and his cronies knew those consequences by February this year at the latest and since then have racked their brains to try to find a way round a Withdrawal Agreement which they never intended to honour. On February 23 The Times ran a story headlined, “Brexit team seeks to evade Irish sea checks on goods”. By June Johnson was describing the agreement as ‘defective’. The Internal Market bill was not concocted a couple of weeks ago, but drafted over months to bind Scotland, Wales and the north into a centralised UK-wide system of trading standards. That can’t happen if the UK is to get a deal with the EU which Johnson wants and needs because businesses and the financial sector want and need one. The introduction of the bill is a sign of weakness and desperation.

Throwing tantrums and calling the British names won’t work or make Johnson back down. It’s up to the EU which will not hesitate to employ all the legal and economic measures available to tighten the screws on Johnson. So far, that’s what the EU is doing. They’ll stay in the trade talks until the bitter end because they know the Internal Market bill is a gun pointing at Johnson’s foot and they won’t allow the British to blame them for walking away. Both the British and the EU know the European Parliament will not ratify any deal unless the Withdrawal Agreement is honoured. The British will lose this one as they have every other contrived confrontation since 2017. Reality trumps fantasy in trade.