It’s a shame Brits aren’t taught much of their own history.
Any shortened story of Northern Ireland needs to begin four hundred years ago with the Ulster Plantation (when James VI+I was on the throne, a lasting Scottish achievement). It’s complex, and you can’t understand present cultural divisions without knowing their history. But if you haven’t the time for Cromwell, William of Orange, Penal Laws and the rest here’s the Sun Readers’ Summary:
One half of the population got a really bad deal. They feel part of the country next door to the South. The other half did alright, but have recently lost their advantage, their prosperity, and are feeling cornered. They feel part of the country next door to the East.
The prejudice and divisions boiled over into the 1960s civil rights protests, which were hijacked by terrorists and mafiosi. The place suffered thirty years of nigh civil-war violence. It killed thousands, and was an economic catastrophe.
What allowed that to be brought to an end was the EU. As joint members of the club – with common standards and no internal borders – there seemed no advantage in being part of a place to the South or the East. They both looked the same, and there’s no point fighting to be one or other side of a border that doesn’t exist. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement sealed the peace, and it wouldn’t have happened with hard borders. It didn’t solve all problems, hundreds of years of discrimination and resentment don’t go away overnight. The fire was put out, but much of the fuel is still there, and a lot is still hot.
Utterly oblivious to all this along came The Brexiteers. Visionary statesmen like Nigel Farage, David Davis and Boris Johnson lead the English Nation against the filthy foreign free-trade and customs area. Unfortunately their calculations didn’t factor that if you’re not in a customs union, then you’re outside it, and need all the usual border stuff: collecting duties, checking legal standards and compliance, etc. This is stuff that happens on all such borders, it’s not news.
Thus a significant land border would be needed with the Republic of Ireland, the UK’s only bordering country. Uh oh, didn’t we just say peace in part of the UK was possible because of no border, and that the fuel was still hot? Yup.
Let us reiterate: if you have two different regulatory areas – with different standards for industrials, medicines, agriculture and the rest – you need a border between them. This isn’t rocket science and you can’t wish it away. It was always an inevitable consequence of Brexicide.
What do you do about it?
Well, you could move the border somewhere. Instead of upsetting those who want South-proximity you could upset those who want East-proximity.
Somebody’s always going to be upset aren’t they?
Yup.
What did Honest Boris do about it?
What he always does: wished it away, and lied about it.
Poor Tessie May tried to compromise in an impossible situation. She proposed a bit of a border to the South with a fallback – backstop – of some border to the East. The NI Unionists said No! (which is what they’ve been saying since 1689). Johnson used it as a knife to stick in her back, engineer her downfall, and his own elevation to premiership. Oh, and that border? Easy, made the ‘backstop’ a ‘frontstop’. He lied to the Unionists, left Northern Ireland in the EU Single Market, which meant Border to the East – within his own country.
And the result?
Pfft, who cares.
Sorry, you mean in the country not in Downing Street? Well, the rioting in Belfast and Derry started in April. So no surprises really.
Was that the end of it?
Chance’d be a fine thing. This border thing – which he negotiated and signed a treaty on, but to be fair was probably oblivious – turned out to be bad PR. Honest Boris (purveyor of the finest used cars) mightn’t care about much, but doesn’t like bad PR. So he blamed it on everyone else, shouted about it a bit, and started making changes to the operation of stuff in international treaties without telling (let alone agreeing with) treaty partners.
They’re at it again this week. They hooted about walking away from the Northern Ireland Protocol, then backtracked and said they hadn’t.
Three results to this…
First, Northern Ireland is a delicate place. Reasonable people saying reasonable things delicately will upset someone, and rioting and death aren’t far away. Those who’ve dealt there have learned to be more than reasonable, they must be thoughtful too. They must understand the history, it’s interpretations and sensitivities; they must measure every word, see them from all sides’ point of view, and deliver them with subtlety. They must be diplomats in the extreme. Negotiating the end of hostilities took years. It took the worlds’ strategic, historical and diplomatic expertise. It took truth, and it took knowing when discrete silence was the right alternative.
Honest Boris-the-Clown Johnson lied to everyone and sent in David (subtle-as-a-cavity-concrete-block) Frost, who also lied to everyone, and shouted a lot.
This border thing might be an annoyance to them, but we should be more careful when people could start dying.
Second, Johnson has the charm to have always been able to get away with his lies. But now that he is lying on behalf of a country it’s the country’s credibility that’s shot. No one will believe a word the UK says again for a generation or two. All these trade agreements the Brexicide Crew have been crowing about will have the Perfidious Albion Margin built into them by a distrustful world.
And third, Unionists are no longer a majority in Northern Ireland. Those wanting to secede from the UK were far-out freaks in the seventies. A United Ireland is often talked about now. If peace goes away, and stability and economic success are something the EU is seen to offer, that freak-view could become the norm.
English disinterest and ignorance (seen as arrogance) have been the cause of most centrifugal action in these isles. That’s why Ireland left a century ago, why Scotland is now hovering around parity for secession; even Wales, which never existed as a unitary nation, is polling more strongly for ‘independence’.
You could write a script for how to start a small civil war and break up the UK. But no need. The Conservative and Unionist Party, through sheer lazy arrogant ignorant stupidity, by letting Johnson fuel his ego-trip in Downing Street, is already doing it.