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Everybody knows that Boris Johnson can lie for England. For his followers, it was one of his best assets. They believed that he could trick the European Union into giving him the only Brexit deal that is really acceptable, one that gives Britain all the advantages of being in the EU without the hassle of membership. The problem is that congenital mendacity is not just for foreigners. If you lie for England, you will also lie to England.
This week, these two manufacturing streams finally became one. By openly admitting that it signed the withdrawal agreement with the EU in bad faith, the Johnson Vote Leave administration also implicitly confessed that it lied to the electorate in the December general election. The cross-contamination of domestic politics by the hoax that is Brexit’s DNA is now complete.
On Tuesday, Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis brazenly informed the House of Commons that a bill to amend the Irish protocol to the withdrawal agreement with the EU “would violate international law”, albeit in “limited ways. and specific “. The rating is silly. If a party can unilaterally change any part of a treaty, nothing in it is binding. But in any case, Lewis’s statement was part of a much larger argument: that the British never quite understood what they were signing.
That same day, Johnson’s court bulletin, the Daily Telegraph, headlined with the headline “Brexit deal never made sense, PM to tell the EU.” The article cited “a high-level government source” as stating that some of its consequences “were not foreseen” at the time and that the treaty would have to be “rewritten to protect the union.”
And the DUP?
In itself, this claim is fraudulent. The idea that Johnson has suddenly realized that the protocol keeps Northern Ireland within the purview of the EU customs union and single market, and therefore has negative implications for the union, is ridiculous. This was precisely what Johnson’s close allies in the Democratic Unionist Party were shouting when he made the deal in October 2019. It was the reason Johnson himself had blindly sworn to the DUP that he would never agree to such a thing. If Johnson didn’t see that a radically different Brexit for one part of the UK would destabilize the union, he is an idiot. But in this case, you can be exonerated of that charge; He knew it very well and did it anyway.
He did it for the same reason he and his Vote Leave team do everything else: because it suits their immediate interests. Theresa May’s backing in Northern Ireland threatened to bring down the entire Brexit project. Then taoiseach Leo Varadkar offered Johnson a way out: the so-called “border on the Irish Sea.” Johnson the supreme opportunist grabbed it, screwed the DUP, declared victory and the rest is history.
But this is where the true falsehood begins. It is clear that Johnson and his most important confreres, Dominic Cummings and Michael Gove, never saw this as anything more than a clever dodge, a tactical retreat. On his blog in March 2019, when May was in power, Cummings addressed “dear Vote Leave activists: don’t worry about the so-called ‘permanent’ commitments that this historically abysmal cabinet is trying to make on our behalf. They are not ‘permanent’ and a serious government, one that is not intimidated by officials and their shitty ‘legal councils’ who have herded ministers like sheep, will dispense with these commitments. “
In May, former chairman of the European Research Group Steve Baker wrote in the Critic that Cummings “said we should vote for the original withdrawal agreement without reading it, on the basis that Michael Gove articulated: we could change it later.” In fact, this had been Gove’s line since December 2017: “If the British people don’t like the deal we have negotiated with the EU, the deal will allow a future government to diverge.”
This idea that Britain could sign the withdrawal agreement with its fingers crossed behind its back and then just ignore it later is, in a way, perfectly consistent with the broader Brexit mindset. At the heart of her theology is the fantasy that there is such a thing as absolute national sovereignty, complete unilateral freedom of action that has been taken away by EU membership. Once Britain is “unchained” from the EU, Britain can do as it pleases. The withdrawal treaty is not a set of permanent obligations, simply a route to the future free of obligations that begins on January 1, 2021.
Brexiters don’t care much that this stunt requires Britain to openly expose itself as a rogue state that treats international agreements like tissues. In their solipsism, they presumably have not bothered to seek, for example, membership of the House Ways and Means committee that would control any trade deals Britain might make with the United States. (To avoid the hassle, it is chaired by Richard Neal and includes fellow Irish-American Democrats Brendan Boyle and Brian Higgins, all very committed to Northern Ireland.)
So what is the catch?
The problem is that all this does not stop at intelligent duplicity towards other countries. It involves the blatant deception of the English voters. Perhaps more than any modern election, Johnson’s campaign in December came down to a single theme and three words: Get Brexit Ready. This would be accomplished by electing a parliament that was fully committed to passing the “oven-ready” and “excellent” withdrawal agreement.
There was always a level of falsehood in this – the withdrawal agreement was not the end of anything. But now it is clear that there was a much deeper and even more cynical level of counterfeiting. It wasn’t just that Brexit wouldn’t be “done” when the withdrawal deal was duly approved, it was that Cummings and Johnson intended to undo it from the start. What was presented to voters as a point of no return was, for them, a temporary fix that they would later scrap. “Ready to Bake” had a secret addendum, “but we’ll come back and edit the cookbook to change the ingredients.”
Brexit is a promise that was made to be broken because the best of all worlds that were offered to voters in 2016 was always a mirage. But that gap has grown and widened over time. It is now an open chasm in British democracy.
This article was written for The Guardian
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