Opinion

Tom Collins: England’s clowning is now beyond a joke

Tom Collins

Tom Collins

Tom Collins is an Irish News columnist and former editor of the newspaper.

Justice secretary Dominic Raab is being accused of leading an assault on human rights
Justice secretary Dominic Raab is being accused of leading an assault on human rights Justice secretary Dominic Raab is being accused of leading an assault on human rights

The Anglo-Irish Treaty, signed 100 years ago this month, still leaves a bitter taste in the mouth. As with many solutions, it created as many problems as it solved, and we are living with those consequences today.

A century on, the north of Ireland remains under the malign influence of a British government which cares not a jot about people living here.

The treaty was signed by a sexually-incontinent British prime minister with wild hair and a reputation for political shenanigans. Who knew Karl Marx was a psychic when he said: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

Lloyd George was a rogue, but Boris Johnson is in a league of his own.

Today the electorate gets a chance to pass its verdict on his maladministration when the people of North Shropshire go to the polls to elect a successor to the disgraced politician Owen Paterson.

Paterson is not unknown around these parts, having served as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland for two years from 2010 – just one in a line of useless British ministers.

That he came a cropper over second jobs representing Randox and Lynn’s Country Foods surprised no-one, with the possible exception of Paterson himself.

The indications are that the seat – a safe Tory one – may be lost. But don’t hold your breath. If there is a wrong way to vote, the English will take it.

We tend to forget that the United Kingdom has been around in its current guise for just a century. It is only in recent years that we have come to realise that ‘United Kingdom’ is a joke name, an attempt to distract from the reality that it is anything but united.

Let us set aside for a moment Northern Ireland. In Great Britain, the constituent parts of the Union were prepared to put up with things so long as there was evidence of a vaguely competent government in Westminster.

That illusion was shattered by David Cameron’s inept decision to hold a referendum on Brexit, and it has been all downhill since then. Johnson is no longer in the gutter, he is subterranean.

Pressing ahead with Brexit, in the face of opposition from the Scots and people here, revealed the Achilles’ heel of the United Kingdom: it is England in disguise. Just like the north of Ireland, unwillingly gifted in the treaty of 2021, Scotland and Wales are mere annexations of an English state.

Just look at the arithmetic. The latest figures put the UK population at just over 67 million; of those, 57 million are in England.

Yes, some powers have been devolved, but the reality is that an English electorate, in an English Parliament, with an English government is making fundamental decisions about the lives of people in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland without an electoral mandate. If that is not a definition of dictatorship, I don’t know what is.

We have seen the consequences in Brexit – economies ruined, people deprived of their right to freedom of movement, colleagues deprived of their right to live here because they are European, or thrust into poverty because the system has mishandled their applications to remain. And now this government of clowns is moving in on fundamental rights.

Dominic Raab (the justice minister who said police don’t investigate crimes retrospectively when asked about rule-breaking in Downing Street) is leading an assault on human rights.

It is hard to avoid the suspicion that Raab wants to replace the Human Rights Act with a Government Rights Act designed to give it free rein to further erode people’s freedoms under the law and to undermine the role of an independent judiciary.

Amnesty International put it succinctly: “If ministers move ahead with plans to water down the Human Rights Act and override judgments with which they disagree, they risk aligning themselves with authoritarian regimes around the world.”

Leopards don’t change their spots. One of Johnson’s first acts in government was to illegally prorogue parliament so he could get his way on Brexit; since then he has presided over a government which believes it can operate outside the rules without penalty.

The English electorate, which has time and time again proved itself willing to cut off its nose to spite its face, might be willing to turn a blind eye to this further erosion of their liberties. It is time the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish stopped allowing the English to take them for fools.

England may have made a clown the prime minister. But it’s not a laughing matter.