In what looks like the ultimate Brexit punchline, legal papers for a Supreme Court appeal against the protocol were held up by customs in Belfast for two weeks after being posted from London. The appeal comprises several cases brought by unionists, including TUV leader Jim Allister. The only protocol grounds for a customs declaration, let alone an inspection, would be if the legal bundle was treated as a business-to-business shipment of goods worth more than £135. The package had a commercial invoice, no doubt for a lot more than £135 with lawyers involved, but it would be extreme nit-picking to treat paperwork as ‘goods’. Legal correspondence is a service, outside the scope of the protocol.
Perhaps this is a demonstration of Brexit’s ultimate irony. The problem with Brussels bureaucracy was always more about pettifogging UK officials implementing it to the letter.
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Biometric data will be required for the new electronic visa waiver, UK immigration minister Robert Jenrick has informed the Commons, although applicants will only have to submit “facial images” until technology improves enough for fingerprints to be uploaded online. This will apply to all non-Irish EU citizens crossing the border from 2025. It will be a catastrophe for the tourism industry and the impact on business travel could have even more expensive consequences. On the plus side, we will finally have an entry system for Northern Ireland that measures the distance between people’s eyes.
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The PSNI is investigating a UVF mural on the Shankill Road, following a complaint from the family of a victim of one of the terrorists portrayed.
Police initially said the mural was “abhorrent” but did not constitute an offence. An updated statement said “the circumstances surrounding the erection of the mural” are being examined.
This points to a simpler approach than prosecuting tricky concepts of hatred or promoting terrorism. Most murals are glorified graffiti, a straightforward offence of criminal damage. Defacing an entire wall might be punishable with a fine of £1,000, a compensation order and perhaps a community order. Issues of hatred and ‘gang involvement’ can be treated as aggravating factors in sentencing.
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Friends of the Earth is calling for an independent water regulator in Northern Ireland, modelled on Ofwat in England and Wales, after UTV revealed NI Water caused 591 pollution incidents between 2017 and 2021 but received only 28 warning letters and nine small fines, totalling £150,000.
Stormont is marking its own homework on water pollution, with two agencies of the Department of Agriculture responsible for prosecutions and NI Water ‘owned’ by the Department for Infrastructure.
However, Ofwat is a poor solution to cite, as it has failed to stop sewage discharges by England’s privatised water industry. A better example is Scotland’s independent regulator, the Water Industry Commission. It is considered highly successful in improving the performance of Scottish Water, a nationalised monopoly, by setting ambitious targets and aggressively enforcing them. This answers the excuse that Northern Ireland hardly needs a proper regulator to oversee one state-owned utility.
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Jeffrey Donaldson made an enormous fuss last month after learning a Queen’s University logo would appear on a report commissioned by Sinn Féin’s group in the European Parliament. The university confirmed use of its logo had been cleared with the authors, two of its academics, including prominent border poll campaigner Professor Colin Harvey.
As with so much of the DUP’s performative outrage, this has proved needlessly counter-productive. The report, published this week, would scarcely have merited consideration had Mr Donaldson not taken umbrage. Its proposal that the EU advocate for a united Ireland received a sufficiently devastating assessment from Alliance’s Stephen Farry: “This is not going to happen.”
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Extinction Rebellion has announced its presence in Northern Ireland by throwing paint over a Belfast branch of Barclays Bank. Protesters must have thought they had travelled across the Irish Sea and back to 1986. A more up-to-date target for environmental campaigners, especially ones known for blocking the road, would be stopping traffic around the new Ulster University campus, or defending other parts of the city centre where vehicular restrictions are widely flouted. Belfast City Council might quietly welcome the assistance. It wants to pedestrianise more streets but needs permission from Stormont’s Department for Infrastructure, which is too busy sniffing petrol to cooperate.
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SDLP veteran Alban Maginnis has said Stormont needs reform but he has warned against fundamentally changing the architecture of power-sharing.
Voluntary coalition would inevitably exclude the DUP or Sinn Féin, which would “alienate a whole section of society”, he told a conference in Belfast. Excluding Sinn Féin has been a “highly dangerous” unionist agenda and this “should be recognised by anyone looking at the reform of the institutions”.
While all this may be true, none of it applies to the only reform proposal on the table - Alliance’s idea of opt-out mandatory coalition.
If both main parties were still entitled to be in the executive but leaving no longer caused Stormont to collapse, they could only exclude themselves and crucially they would have far less reason than at present to consider it. There is little to be gained by stomping out if everyone else can just carry on without you.
