Spike Milligan’s Puckoon outdone by EU comedians in Irish border farce

“If in London someone assumes that the [Brexit] negotiations will deal with other issues first, before the Irish issue, my response would be: Ireland first.”

Jayzus! Would you listen to your man. Isn’t he a lovely man, though? He’s called Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, and he sounds as if he must have an Irish granny. That’s the Brits told off and no mistake. There’ll be no shenanigans from the Ould Enemy with Mr Tusk on their case. Ireland first is your only man…

If you thought Spike Milligan, in “Puckoon”, had written the definitive farce about the Irish border, you were wrong. A new team of comedians – Tusk, Barnier, Juncker, the nihilist stand-up Verhofstadt and other collaborators – has written a script based on the issues surrounding (in their overheated imaginations) the frontier between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland. They have not only outdone Milligan, their whimsy exceeds the wildest flights of fancy from Flann O’Brien.

Ireland has somehow replaced Germany and France as the most influential member state of the European Union. In Brussels it is St Patrick’s Day all the year round. If Guy Verhofstadt were to appear in the Strasbourg parliament attired as a leprechaun, in the current climate it would provoke only muted surprise. The mob bosses have put the word around in Brussels: Leo Varadkar is our guy; what Leo wants, Leo gets.

Now Donald Tusk, in total disregard of the much sweated-over preliminary agreement of last December, is threatening to freeze Brexit negotiations until Britain produces a concrete plan for a “soft” Irish border. “We know today,” he said in Dublin, “that the UK government rejects a customs and regulatory border down the Irish Sea, the EU single market, and the customs union. While we must respect this position, we also expect the UK to propose a specific and realistic solution to avoid a hard border. As long as the UK doesn’t present such a solution, it is very difficult to imagine substantive progress in Brexit negotiations.”

In fact, it is very difficult for anyone to imagine substantive progress in Brexit negotiations with the wholly insincere bullies in Brussels who have repeatedly proved their bad faith and determination to inflict the maximum damage on Britain. From the EU side come nothing but threats, insistence, abuse and demands that contradict the British constitution. Most recently they have tried to appropriate UK fishing rights and extort a further £2.4bn in fines for supposed British laxity in policing tariff fraud on Chinese goods.

Donald Tusk’s wooing of Ireland reeks of hypocrisy. He told his Dublin audience: “We must recognise the democratic decision taken by Britain to leave the EU in 2016 – just as we must recognise the democratic decision made on the island of Ireland in 1998 with all its consequences.” Right; so the Good Friday Agreement, because of its democratic credentials, is holy writ in the eyes of the European Council. But that begs a question, Donald.

What was wrong with another verdict of Irish democracy that occurred between those two events: the Irish referendum in 2008 that rejected the Lisbon Treaty? How did the European Council react to that democratic plebiscite? It pressured Ireland into re-running the referendum the following year to get the “right” answer – without changing a comma of the Lisbon Treaty. Where was the EU’s respect and consideration for the democratic verdict of the Irish people then?

Ireland is being used for Brussels’ purposes. When it has outlived its usefulness it will be abandoned by the cynical opportunists who currently pretend to champion Irish interests. From 1169 until 1922 Ireland battled for independence. After finally gaining sovereignty, it surrendered it again to Brussels after just fifty years. Ireland is now governed by the New Ascendancy. Europhile, rich, secular and “liberal”, a new elite controls Ireland in the interests of a foreign power, just as the old Ascendancy did.

The New Ascendancy, an unholy alliance of politicians, crony capitalists, media professionals and metropolitan liberals, is imposing a globalist culture on Ireland. It is driving the abortion referendum, with George Soros helping to fund the pro-abortion campaign. The New Ascendancy is also promoting Project Ireland 2040 to boost population growth, including large-scale immigration. Above all, it is striving to derail Brexit.

The Irish should reject the New Ascendancy as they did the old. They should listen to dissenters such as Ray Bassett, Dublin’s former ambassador to Canada, who believes Ireland should have backed the UK rather than Brussels. However, behind all the fantasizing about a “hard” border, conjuring visions of electric fences, watch towers, machine guns, minefields and a Trump wall – which is a somewhat hyperbolic representation of a nine-vehicle tailback at Aughnacloy – something new is ratcheting up the impossible demands and insults which constitute Brussels’ notion of diplomacy.

The initial intention of Brussels was to cripple Britain’s trading potential pour encourager les autres, so that the United Kingdom could be held up as a salutary warning of the fate of those who presume to secede from the empire. However, during the year and nine months since the EU referendum, Brussels has been dealt further devastating blows so that what we are now witnessing from Tusk, Barnier and their confreres is no longer measured subversion of British interests but mounting panic.

Three of the four Visegrad states – Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic – have unilaterally repatriated significant amounts of power by simple assertion of sovereignty in defiance of Brussels. Austria is now under Eurosceptic governance.

The Italian election result, in which a majority of the electorate voted for Eurosceptic candidates and Silvio Berlusconi hit the buffers alongside the socialists, is very dangerous for the EU. It was claimed during the campaign that even the League had abandoned the idea of a referendum on the euro currency; but just wait until the mobility of political events persuades an opportunist leader to champion that crowd-pleasing option (every electorate likes to be consulted) and anything could happen.

However, in a less obvious way, the Pyrrhic victory of Angela Merkel in Germany is even more threatening to the EU. Mutti will not be charging back into the nursery to restore order with her former authority. The biggest issue in German politics is the succession to Merkel – hardly conducive to continuing strong leadership. The one indisputable interpretation of last year’s election was that Germans rejected the CDU-SPD grand coalition and today they are ruled by the same old, same old.

For the AfD, now enjoying the prestige and influence of the official opposition, this is a dream scenario. Free of government responsibilities they can pulverise the tired legacy parties. Merkel has even lost the crucial finance ministry. She is no longer Empress of Europe.

Yet the decisive element that could precipitate the implosion of the European project is outside Germany and Italy. Emmanuel Macron is a man of straw who is still – in the style of the early Blair – persuading the impressionable, who long for strong EU leadership to get the gravy trains running on time, of his messianic potential. He is bulldozing forward an integrationist programme that runs in diametric opposition to the wishes of most European electorates.

It is more often idiots than strong men who provoke disaster and Macron is typical of the self-entitled, posturing buffoons who run Europe. No wonder the EU hoods are becoming even more rabid in their demands and abuse: their discourtesy is now rooted in fear.