BORIS Johnson is widely considered a disaster for the union. If he is on his way out - and few parties are as ruthless as the Tories in ditching a liability - unionists may not find his successor much of an improvement.
Chancellor Rishi Sunak, the favourite to replace Johnson, was the subject of a profile in the Financial Times last year. A Conservative colleague was quoted saying: “I remember discussing the future of the union with Rishi and he argued that England should break away. He was advocating the end of the UK because it doesn’t make financial sense to him. He doesn’t have any love for the institution and I suspect he looks at it as he looks at anything: what’s the profit?”
Sunak immediately denied the report.
“There are some comments about the union falsely attributed to me in the FT today,” he posted on Twitter.
“My parents moved to the United Kingdom, not England, because the union represented an idea of opportunity. I am a strong believer in our union of four nations. Hope that clarifies that!”
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The Nationality and Borders Bill will introduce an electronic travel authorisation (ETA) from 2025. Most visitors except British and Irish citizens will have to apply for it 48 hours in advance to enter the UK, including across the Irish border.
This news, while long expected, has caused some consternation. The ETA should not be much of a nuisance for resident non-nationals in the Republic if it is valid for two years and swift to obtain online, like its American equivalent. Nor is it necessarily off-putting to cross-border tourists, many of whom already apply for Schengen visas. The government insists there will be no document checks at the border. However, it is an huge own goal not to have elucidated everything from the outset, ideally with special rules for the island of Ireland, which will almost inevitably have to be created. The bill says almost nothing about how the ETA will work, leaving all its rules to be set later by regulation.
Worse still, it makes repeated references to the Common Travel Area, showing Northern Ireland was not forgotten. Key questions have just been left hanging for the sake of ministerial convenience.
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Fox hunting is the pre-election culture war clash nobody was expecting from Stormont. Even the English grew bored of it years ago, so Sinn Fein’s tally ho enthusiasm is bizarre. The party whipped its MLAs into opposing an Alliance bill, then gave a series of plainly untrue reasons for doing so, culminating in saying its policy north and south is “regulation, not a ban”, although Mary Lou McDonald wrote last year “Sinn Fein is opposed to fox-hunting and will vote in favour of a ban at the next opportunity”.
This farce raises a serious question of who is calling the shots. The party president has been made to look ridiculous and real damage has been done with target voters across Ireland, months before a northern election. Yet that is apparently of little importance compared to the pastimes of the republican country set.
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There was some light-hearted musing at the judicial review into the DUP’s boycott of the North-South Ministerial Council.
What would happen, the judge asked, if he ordered DUP ministers to attend the council and they showed up but refused to engage or make any decisions?
That would be “difficult territory”, the claimant’s barrister conceded.
This all appeared to be avoiding a trickier question: what happens if ministers are ordered to attend and do not show up?
Disobeying such an order would be contempt, theoretically punishable by imprisonment. But it is inconceivable that would occur and impractical to start the long process of threatening any enforcement, as the DUP’s ministers will be reshuffled out of office within months. In reality, the decision facing the court is how much it can scold the DUP without becoming embroiled in a pantomime.
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Somebody at the Department for Infrastructure has had enough of ‘public consultation’. A survey of pop-up cycle lanes introduced during the pandemic attracted 800 responses, a third from cyclists who liked the lanes and half from taxi drivers complaining about them. In its final report, the department notes: “Simply put, the survey confirmed what was to be expected: those who felt that they benefited from the cycle lane considered it a good thing; and those who felt they did not benefit from it considered it not to be a good thing. In this sense, the survey adds nothing to the review.”
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Once again, there has been DUP and Sinn Féin solidarity against libel reform.
As legal experts testified to an assembly committee on the need for reform, the DUP’s Keith Buchanan asked if it was acceptable for journalists to lie to get a story. Sinn Féin’s Maolíosa McHugh said some journalists tell lies and asked if “freedom of speech trumps all else”.
The expert witnesses had to patiently explain that the purpose of libel law is not to prevent lies but to defend reputations.
While that distinction might be lost on many people, politicians should be able to grasp it.