“Northern Ireland is not part of the United Kingdom.” Discuss (as it used to say on examination papers). One person who clearly did not pass his exams, despite being married to his schoolteacher, is Emmanuel Macron. His reported claim during the G7 talks that Northern Ireland is not really part of the United Kingdom was supposedly triggered by Boris Johnson asking him if he thought a ban on transporting goods from Toulouse to Paris would be acceptable.
Macron apparently claimed that was a false comparison, since Northern Ireland was not part of the UK. Embarrassed aides subsequently tried to spin this gaffe by suggesting the president simply meant that the sea separated the two. That would be in the way that the sea separates France from Corsica, without creating an international border. This expression of geopolitical illiteracy by the president of France was both instructive and malevolent.
It was instructive because it encapsulated the EU mentality, which is to promote the irredentist ambitions of the Irish Republic, in the hope of detaching Northern Ireland from Britain, to dismantle the United Kingdom, as a punishment for Brexit. That is why the EU has tried to pretend that, since Brexit, a major international frontier does not run across Ireland – which it certainly does – and to fabricate an imaginary border down the Irish Sea, by stationing EU officials on British soil and jobsworths with clipboards impeding trade at Northern Irish ports.
Brussels is trying, by a process of osmosis, to create a climate that promotes the illusion that Northern Ireland is increasingly drifting away from Britain. Northern Ireland will have every right to leave the United Kingdom on the day after a majority of its electorate votes for Irish reunification, but until that hypothetical event it must remain firmly anchored in the UK. The Good Friday Agreement, to which EU leaders, including Macron, claim to be fanatically attached, confirms Northern Ireland’s membership of the United Kingdom.
Yet Macron, who supposedly values peace in Northern Ireland above all other considerations, made a provocative claim, at a major international forum, that cuts at the roots of Northern Ireland’s constitutional status. He did so at the start of the marching season in Northern Ireland, the worst conceivable moment to fuel Unionist paranoia. That was beyond irresponsible. There has already been loyalist unrest over the Northern Ireland Protocol: what is Macron trying to do? Provoke serious violence?
Brussels is totally deaf to Unionist concerns. It considers that only by annoying the nationalist community could violence be provoked, when recent history proves the opposite. But Macron’s provocation was made more irresponsible by the precarious situation of the Northern Ireland Assembly, facing possible renewed shutdown relating to nationalist demands over provision for the Irish language. Lobbying for support of the language originally native to the province is a reasonable cultural demand. Arlene Foster, in her farewell speech as First Minister, urged Unionists to accede to it.
But the perceived existential threat to their British citizenship posed by Macron could harden DUP opinion against concessions on Gaelic, thus closing down Stormont. It is notable that Sinn Fein is opportunistically appealing to the imperial oppressor at Westminster to pass Irish language legislation over the heads of the devolved assembly, as it did recently over abortion law. That is a further strand in the strategy to abolish Northern Ireland: to erode devolution, in order to silence the majority voice, which is Unionist.
It was reprehensible of Boris to sign up to the Northern Ireland Protocol, which drives a wedge into the integrity of the already beleaguered United Kingdom constitution, as well as into British sovereignty. This crisis is serious for Boris. Despite his many other mistakes, his credibility hangs on two achievements: he got Brexit done and he rolled out the vaccines.
Now, with customs officials infesting Larne and Belfast, and a threatened ban on transporting processed meats from Britain to Belfast, people are beginning to wonder if he got Brexit done after all. Why are there EU officials calling the shots on British soil? Why are we once again deadlocked in “Brexit” negotiations, long after we have left? This is the consequence of indulging Brussels’ ambitions for imperial outreach.
Against the grain of European politics over the past six years, the EU is insanely pursuing its integrationist obsession. It is even attempting to sanction Germany, after its constitutional court rejected the primacy of EU law. The same applies to Poland. Altogether, the EU is currently embroiled in attempted legal sanctions against eight member states, in every case in pursuit of intrusive intervention into their domestic affairs (for inadequately coercive “hate” laws, in some cases).
With our newly recovered – though now partially compromised – sovereignty, Britain needs to revert to a policy of independent Realpolitik. Under that rubric, the conduct of the European Union cannot realistically be classified as anything other than hostile. Brussels is not in Britain’s corner; the peoples of its individual member states are our friends and their cultures are an attraction to us, but as a geopolitical power bloc the EU has made it clear it is our enemy. That blunt reality needs to inform our policy towards Brussels.
Britain has enough to concern itself with in recovering from the pandemic without being distracted by the imperious demands of a power bloc to which we do not belong. Remainer cant about “dishonouring our signature” – the typical masochist knee-jerk reaction of people who automatically side with this country’s opponents – is nonsense. If a treaty proves to be unsustainable, we must abandon it. In response to a written question in the House of Lords on 13 November 2018 Lord Ahmad, on behalf of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, revealed that, since 1988, the UK had unilaterally withdrawn from 52 international treaties.
It is time to raise that number to 53. The Prime Minister should instruct Lord Frost to deliver a final ultimatum to Brussels that, unless the EU stops trying to subvert the British constitution and disrupt trade, by agreeing to a sympathetic interpretation of the Protocol, Britain will invoke Article 16, to put the Protocol into a state of inanition from which it will never be revived. Boris needs to get in touch with his inner Lord Palmerston. Britain long held a reputation for more Machiavellian diplomacy than the crude coercion of the EU. It is time to bring Perfidious Albion out of retirement.
