Learn from Northern Ireland: beware entrenching Brexit divisions

 The unloved backstop in May’s deal offers a new strategic advantage writes MATTHEW O'TOOLE in THE FT


In my hometown, as with a handful of others in Northern Ireland, there is an Irish Street, English Street and Scotch Street. They were named to reflect the origins of people who have lived alongside one another for centuries, without ever quite becoming one people. 

These streets long predate the creation of Northern Ireland following partition in 1921; they predate the Act of Union between Britain and Ireland in 1801. At the most basic level, they reveal the enduring dilemma of that part of Ireland: how to accommodate more than one thing. How to live with ambiguity without antagonism. A task at which we have failed in the past with appalling consequences. 

The Northern Ireland backstop is now routinely described as the central barrier, or stumbling block, in agreeing orderly terms for the UK’s withdrawal from the EU. This view has become conventional in London — particularly among Brexiters, but also many Remainers — with little attempt to understand the prior problem that required solving. This tendency has been compounded by the extraordinary power currently wielded at Westminster by the Democratic Unionist Party, which does not welcome ambiguous interpretations of Northern Ireland’s current status, nor of its history. It opposed the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, which enshrined the principle of consent (Northern Ireland remaining in the UK until a majority voted otherwise) but added several asterisks that qualified UK sovereignty. 

That the DUP is the only party representing Northern Ireland in the Commons is itself further evidence of the place’s ambiguity. Sinn Fein, which holds the rest of the seats but does not take them, has never recognised the legitimacy of the UK parliament’s authority. 

It is the persistence of this dividing axis in one small corner of Europe that was always — and I do mean always — going to complicate Brexit. But something more is happening: at the very moment Northern Ireland’s divisions again require subtle accommodation, Britain’s own divisions are making that impossible. Guided by the baleful influence of the DUP, whose guiding mission is to assert Northern Ireland’s unadulterated Britishness, Britain is becoming more like Northern Ireland. 

Karen Bradley, the Northern Ireland secretary, was rebuked recently for implying precisely this — that the region’s divisions contain warnings for Britain at large. Northern Ireland, she wrote, “in particular, knows the damage that division can do”. Notwithstanding her previous confessed ignorance on the place she now governs — not knowing that unionists tended not to vote for nationalist parties, and vice versa — Ms Bradley was not wrong. 

Brexit has created — or perhaps revealed and clarified — an intense division in British politics, and in British life. As in Northern Ireland, reality itself is increasingly defined by the split over EU membership. Contradictory narratives — of national self-harm versus thwarted national liberation — are congealing in the veins of Remainers and Leavers. Several studies, including a recent analysis by polling expert John Curtice, have shown how entrenched Remain or Leave identities have become: far more fundamental than attachment to any political party. Voters on each side are now invested in these identities in a way that prevents compromise. 

There are clear limits to this analogy, dictated by respect for Irish history and its ancient and recent traumas. Britain is not the same as Northern Ireland, which is precisely the point of the backstop. It should, however, be careful about becoming any more like it, however maddening each side of the Brexit divide finds the perceived distortions of the other. 

It is also wrong to imply both sides are as bad as each other: fault lies largely with the Brexiters, whose zeal has driven the country to this precipice. But whether Britain ends up leaving the EU or not, its divided society will need to a find a way of accommodating tribes that have become remarkably entrenched in little more than two and a half years. 

In a few days, I travel back to Northern Ireland to spend Christmas. The place whose ambiguities are at the centre of Brexit, but where the views of most people are eerily absent from the debate in London. The backstop, unloved by virtually all sides in British politics, is mostly welcomed in a land that has learnt to live with constructive ambiguity. It remains a useful diplomatic concept as an alternative to purity and further division. 

The backstop guarantees Northern Ireland access to both UK and European markets. It offers the place something it has rarely known: strategic advantage. The chance to put its contradictions to a more productive use rather than hostility. 

If only divided Britain would give it the chance.

Signs that Britain may not Brexit after all the fuss

Sean O'Grady in The Independent

Is this it? The moment when the May premiership is over? Could Corbyn end up taking power in a matter of weeks? It’s at least possible, though I concede it sounds far-fetched at first.

In history, some British Prime Ministers have had their premierships wrecked by the “Irish Question”. Others, in more recent times, have been destroyed by Europe. Theresa May is unique in managing to combine both famously intractable and insoluble issues into one lethal cocktail.

And so, it seems she is about to swallow the poison. Her premiership may be even shorter than many anticipated, and a Jeremy Corbyn-led government could be a fact of British life by the time the snows melt next year. Here’s how.

From what we can discern, the Government is perfectly happy to concede “special status” for Northern Ireland / Ireland in the Brexit talks – anathema to the Ulster Unionists. This is because the Government desperately needs to get onto the second phase of the process – the trade talks for the whole UK – and MPs, without being too crude about it, are happy to sign whatever the EU sticks under their nose and worry about the consequences later.

In the end, they will risk their support from the DUP to get moving on Brexit. Jobs (Tory MPs’ included) are at stake. After all, ministers such as David Davis always say that “nothing’s agreed until everything’s agreed”, so having now ratted on the Democratic Unionists, they can, in due course, re-rat on the Irish and the EU, after a trade deal is sorted out. 

With a bit of luck, some creative ambiguity and some more bribes and false promises for the DUP, Theresa May might just pull it off. Perfidious Albion would have foxed the Unionists in the wider national (i.e. Tory) interest.
For such an unlucky Prime Minister, it would be a bit of a turnaround – but, as in horse-racing and football, the form book does count for something; the litany of May’s calamities suggest she won’t, in fact, get away with it.

The DUP could quite conceivably get so angry that they’d scrap their agreement with the Tory-minority Government and resolve to get rid of them. Then May would have to appeal to the Opposition parties, especially Labour, to rescue her in the Commons.

Fat chance. If Corbyn wants, he could find any number of grounds for voting May out of office, but failure of Brexit is a pretty good one. He could then either cobble together a new Frankenstein coalition or, more realistically, follow the provisions of the Fixed Term Parliament Act to secure a fresh general election. With an eight-point poll lead over the Conservatives, wouldn’t you?

Of course that would mean the DUP would let in the “Sinn Fein-loving Corbyn” (as they might see it), so they’d have a tough choice, but they might have sufficient fear about what their constituents in Ulster would do to them if they kept the treacherous Tories in power that they’d feel they have nothing to lose.

In which case we’d have an election in, say, February, and perhaps another hung Parliament – but this time with Labour as the largest party, able to govern in its own right, though constrained by parliamentary arithmetic. 

The incoming government would ask, if it was sensible, to put Brexit on pause while it changes policy, and the EU would happily oblige if there was a chance of reversing Brexit – via, say, a second referendum. Or Corbyn and Keir Starmer could just agree to stay in the single market and some version of the customs union. Arlene Foster might in fact be able to live with that.

In which case, by spring, it would all be over for May, Boris, Gove and the old gang, and they could get on with their civil war in earnest.

Not for the first time, the ball is in Jeremy Corbyn’s court, both in terms of unseating Theresa May and stopping Brexit, or at least a hard Brexit. The Irish Question and the European issue will, not for the first time, have altered the course of British history, and end prematurely some once-glittering political careers.

There is a magic money tree. But only for the Queen and the DUP

Owen Jones in The Guardian


There is no magic money tree, say the Tories: unless it’s to bribe extremists to keep them in power, or to renovate the palaces of multimillionaire monarchs. Today nurses take to the streets to demand an end to a pay freeze that has slashed the living standards of these life-saving, care-giving national heroes. One such nurse confronted Theresa May – whose lack of emotional intelligence is only matched by her lack of authority – on national television before the election. There was no magic money tree, was May’s robotic response. If the nurse had been met with a middle finger, it would scarcely have been less insulting.

Let’s be absolutely clear. The Tories’ programme of cuts – austerity, whatever you want to call it – is a con, a lie, an ideologically driven act of sadism that has caused immeasurable and unnecessary hurt and pain. The Tories are keen to portray Labour as shambolic and wasteful spendthrifts. In this they are aided and abetted by the party’s post-crash failure to defend its own spending record. Then the Tories lost their majority, and lo! They did conjure up the magic money tree to shower gifts on their homophobic, anti-choice, climate change-denying, sectarian friends.

While nurses are driven to food banks in one of the richest societies that has ever existed, the Tories have almost doubled the Queen’s income. We live in a country that cannot provide affordable, comfortable and safe homes for millions of its own citizens, but the Tories can suddenly find tens of millions more each year to help renovate Buckingham Palace. There is a magic money tree for palaces, but not people.


The money soon to be showered on Northern Ireland will undoubtedly help the Six Counties

The cost of the Tories’ calamitous failure will be significantly more than £1bn, of course. As Nick Macpherson – a former Treasury official, puts it – this is just a “downpayment. DUP will back for more ... again and again.” And neither can they be trusted with taxpayers’ dosh, having wasted nearly half a billion on a failed energy scheme.

But do you know what? The money soon to be showered on Northern Ireland will undoubtedly help the six counties. It will improve public services, education, the health services and infrastructure. It will undoubtedly lift living standards and fuel economic growth. That is what public investment – so mercilessly slashed by the Tories – achieves.

And if it’s good enough for Northern Ireland, it’s good enough for the rest of us. We can ask the most well off, for whom the crash was only ever something they read about in newspapers, to pay a bit more money; the same with booming big business. The billions are there: for housing, education, infrastructure, police – and, yes, to pay our nurses a decent wage.

The Tories are nothing more than a racket for their wealthy backers, a crude political instrument to defend the interests of Britain’s shameless vested interests. They will happily locate a magic money tree if it’s their own political survival that’s at risk. But what is good for the partisan interests of the Conservative party is not good for the nation.

The Tories’ Ulster spending spree should embolden all of us who always believed austerity was an ideologically driven con. On Saturday, thousands will march with the People’s Assembly to demand the end of the failed Tory experiment. The Tories have legitimised their arguments. Austerity is over for Northern Ireland, it’s over for the Queen, and now it must end for everybody else too.