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Dermot Lacey is a Labour Party member of Dublin City Council for the Pembroke ward.
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That’s what he said
He, by the way is Brandon Lewis, the UK’s Northern Ireland secretary, basically their minister for Northern Ireland.
What he’s announcing there is the UK government’s shirking from the treaty that they signed last December for them to withdraw from the European Union. He immediately created a million memes of people planning to tell judges that they might be had up in front of that yes, they had broken the law, but only in a very specific and limited way.
There’s been a ton of comment and speculation on what the EU might do in retaliation, on whether they could sue the UK, be awarded damages, whether the UK would pay and loads more. I’m not going to add to that pile.
I’m more interested in what this tells us about what is going on in the UK government right now. It’s worth noting that this bill, if it goes to their schedule will go from being published to being law within a week, which is positively light-speed compared to the normally glacial rate that laws get enacted.
And for you at the back who weren’t paying attention, last December Leo Varadkar met Boris Johnson near Liverpool, and they struck a deal for an acceptable way to prevent an economic border on the island of Ireland, and that basically meant an economic border between Britain and Ireland. The EU and the UK signed this deal, and that clip was Brandon Lewis saying yeah but no but we don’t feel like sticking to our agreement, and agreeing that was a breach of international law.
Laura Kuenssberg, the BBC political correspondent who is, let’s be charitable about this, close to the Conservative Party, reported being told by EU top brass that they wouldn’t take the bait. Whoever said that I think got it right. It’s pretty obvious that this stunt was designed to get attention.
If you’re going to break the law, it’s not normal to stand up and announce it. So all those memes were wrong, it’s not like telling the judge that you broke the law, but only in a very specific and limited way, it’s more like telling the police that you’re going to break the law as they guard a cash transport, and then taking out your sawn-off shotgun and pulling on a ski mask.
In general, announcing something like that in advance is not the done thing. But it’s particularly not the done thing when the person who you’re offending against is someone whose goodwill you are ostensibly depending on in sensitive trade negotiations.
Let’s bear in mind here that we are now well into September. The odds of signing off on a trade deal for the UK, and getting all the infrastructure in place to implement it, whatever it might be, are getting slimmer by the day.
The EU are threatening to cancel the trade talks if this law isn’t taken off the table – they could hardly do anything else; you can’t exactly negotiate the next treaty while the other side are off boasting how they’re not keeping to the last one.
The whole purpose behind negotiating a deal is that not doing so has consequences here. Not least, by the way, risking the supposedly important trade deal with the US. Nancy Pelosi didn’t mince her words, she said
And she can do that, all such deals must be passed by the House of Representatives, which she controls.
This is not information that would come as a surprise to anyone in London, but they pulled this stunt anyway. They did that for a reason. The question is what reason. The only reasoning that I can see is that, unlike the great majority of British people, the people making these decisions are very, very well financially insulated against the consequences of their actions.
They might be getting cheered by the Mail and the Express, confidently expecting Johnny Foreigner to come to heel and give England the obedience it deserves. This looks like Johnson is aiming for a no-deal exit, but on balance I think there will be a deal. A panicked, partial, last-minute barely covering the necessities and still leaving chaos in January and long thereafter.
But we’ll see.
