January 16, 2020 53
three years in Russia—has refused to
come before Parliament and answer
questions about the self-admitted
electoral interference that Vote Leave
committed.
Even before the election, we were in
a situation in which the chief adviser
of the prime minister in Parliament
was judged to have been in contempt
of that Parliament. The corruption is
pervasive: Leave.EU—the organiza-
tion allied to Nigel Farage that Arron
Banks (the son-in-law of a Russian
state official) funded—received for
free (and didn’t declare) the services of
Cambridge Analytica, which targeted
swing voters via Facebook. Cambridge
Analytica, an offshoot of a military
disinformation and “election manage-
ment” company, was cofounded and
part-owned by Robert Mercer, the
hedge-fund billionaire who helped
fund Trump’s election campaign. Cam-
bridge Analytica’s vice-president was
Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief
strategist. Mercer also funded Breit-
bart News. It’s not hard to see what’s
going on here. Cui bono? as lawyers
like to ask. The Conservatives, like the
Republicans, are in deep with Moscow.
Johnson, outrageously, refused to re-
lease a report on Russian interference
in the Brexit referendum until after the
general election in December.
Now that Johnson has his majority,
he is threatening to “review” the BBC
and Channel 4 (both public broadcast-
ers), and who knows what deals he will
strike with the US—on everything
from the National Health Service to
fracking to food standards—in order
to get a trade agreement. Britain, in
all of these negotiations, will have no
leverage. They will be desperate to get
agreements, and their prospective trad-
ing partners know it. The idea that the
Tories will “Get Brexit Done,” which
was their electoral slogan, is of course
nonsense, since the actual work of ne-
gotiating and ratifying trade agree-
ments will take years—Canada’s deal
with the EU, for instance, took seven
years to negotiate and was twenty-two
years in the making.
Johnson has pledged to review “the
broader aspects of our constitution,”
including “the relationship between
the Government, Parliament and the
courts; the functioning of the royal pre-
rogative,” and to set up a “Constitution,
Democracy and Rights Commission
that will... come up with proposals to
restore trust in our institutions and in
how our democracy operates.” Many
fear this is code for enacting revenge
against the UK Supreme Court for
reversing Johnson’s suspension of Par-
liament this past September, when he
refused to allow Parliament to sit in
order to prevent scrutiny of the gov-
ernment’s plan to pull the Britain out
of the EU. The manifesto also pledges
to “update” the Human Rights Act,
which incorporates the European Con-
vention on Human Rights into UK law,
and has long been an irritant to the
Conservative government, frequently
cited against it in cases dealing with ev-
erything from taxation to immigration.
In truth, Johnson couldn’t care
tuppence about Brexit: he is the sort of
man who couldn’t care tuppence about
anything, so studied is his nonchalance,
so offhand his “brilliance.” He is, like
Trump, without principles. The night
before he decided to come out in sup-
port of Leave, he famously wrote two
columns—one for and one against
Brexit—for the reactionary newspaper
the Daily Telegraph, and it was only
his single-minded pursuit of power,
it seems, that caused him to choose
Leave as being the path most likely to
lead to his becoming prime minister.
Think about that. Think about some-
one now speeding an entire country
toward a cliff edge they have no idea
whether they should go over or not.
Johnson’s attitude to Northern Ire-
land is entirely typical of his class’s
cavalier disdain for the non-English
parts of the UK. The Leave campaign
repeatedly said that Northern Ireland
was not a problem—just as they said
a trade deal could be struck in weeks.
Johnson likened the Irish border to the
boundary between Camden and West-
minster. When it became clear that the
border was, actually, a problem, John-
son abandoned the much misunder-
stood “backstop,” moving the border
to the Irish Sea.A note on that: the backstop was a so-
lution that temporarily kept the United
Kingdom in the EU Customs Union
until a permanent solution could be
found to avoid a hard border between
the Republic and Northern Ireland.
If no “permanent solution” could be
found, it would remain indefinitely. It
came about when the UK rejected an
EU proposal to institute customs checks
in the Irish Sea, i.e., between Scotland/
England/Wales and Northern Ireland.
Maintaining the seamlessness of trade
and travel between Great Britain and
Northern Ireland was a nonnegotiable
requirement of the Democratic Union-
ist Party (DUP). Since Theresa May’s
government depended on the ten votes
of the DUP, this became one of May’s
“red lines.” In its first Brexit white
paper, her government confirmed the
UK’s observance of the constitutional
framework laid out by the Good Friday
Agreement in 1998. As a result, the EU
agreed to the backstop, extending the
trade border to the whole of the UK.
But because May’s government fell,
and Johnson’s had no working majority
with or without the DUP, our prime min-
ister was freed up to play fast and loose
with Northern Ireland. Since repeatedly
explaining that the technology would
turn up to create a miraculously invis-
ible border didn’t wash with the EU,
Johnson decided that the integrity of
the United Kingdom was a small price
to pay for Brexit. (Indeed, it may well
turn out that the UK itself is the price.)
Stating the obvious for the ignorant
or willfully obtuse, George Hamilton,
the chief constable of Northern Ireland,
said in a Guardian interview last year:If you put up significant physical
infrastructure at a border which
is the subject of contention politi-
cally, you are re-emphasising the
context and the causes of the con-
flict. So that creates tensions and
challenges and questions around
people’s identity, which in some
ways the Good Friday Agreement
helped to deal with.Now that Johnson commands a major-
ity sufficient to push through his with-
drawal agreement, the DUP will have
to stand and watch as he destroys the
union they claimed to defend. John-
son—in his last-minute Brexit agree-ment of October 17—moved the border
from the island of Ireland to the Irish
Sea, and predictably the Democratic
Unionist Party are (in the local par-
lance) scundered, even though it’s clear
to everyone that they helped bring this
about. The DUP campaigned for Leave,
even funneling £400,000 of unidentified
funds to the Leave campaign. Northern
Ireland itself voted by a majority of 56
percent to Remain. Many of those who
voted Leave—particularly the farm-
ers—are now experiencing buyers’ re-
morse, as they belatedly realize that EU
subsidies will dry up and that markets
for their goods (including, now, Great
Britain) are not guaranteed.
The level of discourse about the
Brexit vote in Northern Ireland was
summed up for me by a guy I know
named Norman, who at my mother’s
wake a couple of years ago explained
why he’d voted Leave. Since the living
room was mostly full of Catholics, he
leaned in close and said that one day
he was driving through Coalisland, a
Republican stronghold near our town,
and saw all the Sinn Féin posters ad-
vocating Remain. “Well,” he said, “I
thought, if these bastards are voting
Remain, I’m voting Leave.”
Now, though, hard-line Unionists
are waking up to what their party has
brought about, and realizing the level
of betrayal to which they’ve been sub-
jected. On October 21 hundreds of
loyalists gathered at the Constitutional
Club in East Belfast: their message—as
Jamie Bryson, a loyalist rabble-rouser
and instigator of many of the flag pro-
tests, said—was that they “won’t walk
meekly and quietly into an economic
united Ireland,” which Johnson’s deal
proposes. Bryson went on:The anger is immense.... This
was the people speaking. They
have said they are fed up. They can
take that message back to Boris
Johnson. For three years [the Irish
prime minister] Leo Varadkar and
the Irish government said, ‘There
can’t be a border on the island
of Ireland where there will be a
threat to peace, but it’s OK, we’ll
shaft the loyalists and put a border
in the Irish Sea.’ They are entering
very dangerous territory.He added, “Tonight was about taking
the temperature and it’s sky high.”
The arrogance of the Etonians—of
Cameron’s feckless, reckless, senseless
decision to hold a referendum, and now
of Johnson’s lies and casual betrayals of
unionism (the Conservative Party’s full
moniker is, ironically, the Conservative
and Unionist Party)—is going to bring
about the renewal of bloodshed in our
battered little corner of the earth. The
Good Friday agreement took many
years to bring about, but like all truces
it can be undone in an instant. Many
of those currently being arrested in
the province for terrorist offenses are
young—that is, they’re privileged: they
don’t remember the bad old days.One of the reasons the Tories had
such a huge victory is the malignant
and unrelenting right-wing media’s at-
tacks on Jeremy Corbyn. Neither did
he help his case by refusing to back Re-
main. This is also why it’s a mistake to
interpret the Tory landslide as a man-
date to leave the EU: Labour was not
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