This year’s silly season of daft summer stories is over, but obviously not for some DUP MPs.
They’ve been queuing up to make eejits of themselves advocating far right nonsense opposed to their own government’s – and their own party leader’s – injunctions to deal with the pandemic. In one respect at least they’re consistent: strangers to reason, they’ve never followed scientific findings on evolution, climate change, gay blood transfusions or anything else. So why break a rule with Covid-19?
Stepping into this undisciplined display in his own inimitable way is Sir Jeffrey ‘I could live with 40,000 job losses’ Donaldson. He accused Joe Biden of “ridiculous rhetoric” for opposing the British government plans to repudiate an international treaty, the benefits of which they successfully fought an election on and signed less than a year ago. Biden pointed out, along with the Irish government, the EU Commission and sundry members of the other 27 EU member states, that breaking the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) would damage the Good Friday Agreement.
Donaldson accused Biden of not having read the GFA and went on to assert with no evidence that a customs border in the Irish Sea “drives a coach and horses” through the GFA, though he doesn’t explain how because he can’t; the Irish protocol does nothing of the kind. Now, given that Donaldson was prepared to accept a no deal Brexit even at the cost of 40,000 job losses in the short term and a guaranteed crash in living standards here, he’s certainly someone who knows something about ridiculous rhetoric. Remember him in 2018 and 2019 repeatedly claiming there was magic technology available to check lorry loads of livestock and goods crossing the border? Technology that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. Eejits in his camp even contemplated, wait for it, face recognition for sheep. G’wan, look it up.
However, back to his assertions about the GFA, which remember, he always opposed, having walked out on David Trimble on the very morning talks concluded. Now he’s an expert, lecturing Joe Biden on what the GFA entails.
Donaldson says “consensus is at the heart” of the GFA. He’s wrong. For the last couple of years unionists, and especially the DUP, have been deliberately replacing the consent principle in the GFA with the word ‘consensus’. Consensus is their sneaky new word for a unionist veto. They unsuccessfully tried to have it inserted in the Irish protocol of the WA demanding “cross-community consent” for its continuation. Instead, correctly, what’s included is a ‘consent mechanism’ whereby the assembly votes by simple majority in four years whether to continue the operation of the protocol. Unionists will lose and they know it because Brexit will be disastrous.
In the GFA cross community consent only operates in Strand One (Safeguards). The consent principle in the GFA applies to consent to sovereignty only – a simple majority vote on Irish unity or not. Consensus applies nowhere and certainly not to customs, EU law or VAT, all of which are ‘reserved or excepted’ matters for which Westminster can and does legislate without breaching the GFA.
As for Donaldson’s claim that an Irish Sea border drives a coach and horses through the GFA, the exact opposite is the case. When the GFA was negotiated (not by self-appointed trade and GFA expert Donaldson, or anyone in the DUP) the fact of UK and the Republic’s joint membership of the single market and customs union guaranteed a border-free Ireland.
The truth therefore is that not to have an economic border in the Irish Sea would drive a coach and horses through the GFA as Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Richie Neal and the rest of the world know perfectly well. It’s always important to call out the ridiculous rhetoric and the codswallop Donaldson and the DUP spout because, unchallenged for the rubbish it is, it serves only to create imaginary grievances among their diminishing deluded Brexit supporters.
