The New York Review of Books - USA (2020-01-16)

54 The New York Review

frequently portrayed the election as a

popularity poll between two much dis-

liked men, and Corbyn was disliked

even more than Johnson.

As for Brexit, Labour’s final agreed-

on position was that they would rene-

gotiate a withdrawal agreement “within

six months” and then put that “credible

withdrawal deal” against the Remain op-

tion in a public vote. The party commit-

ted to stay neutral on whether to leave

or remain until a later date. Needless

to say, this refusal to take a stand didn’t

play well with voters of any stripe. Cor-

byn now says he won’t contest the next

election (having lost two) but has not yet

resigned. His stance on everything from

anti-Semitism to the IRA (whose ter-

rorism for many years he refused to un-

equivocally condemn) made it hard for

many to wholeheartedly endorse him.

And so, with Johnson’s super-

majority being taken as a mandate for a

hard Brexit, the UK will travel further

along the path to its own destruction.

Because the Scottish National Party

cleaned up (taking forty-eight of Scot-

land’s fifty-nine seats), calls for a new

poll on Scottish independence will be

hard to ignore, particularly as Scot-

land watches Northern Ireland remain

in the EU customs union—even if it

means that our country will have to ne-

gotiate a situation whereby goods, ser-

vices, and people will have to undergo

checks to reach another part of the UK.

Stephen Barclay, the Brexit secretary,

confirmed that arrangements will have

to be made in order to move goods or

services or people from Northern Ire-

land to Britain, though Johnson, typi-

cally, has denied it. On a visit to the

Tayto Castle potato-chip factory in Tan-

dragee, Northern Ireland, Johnson said:

There will not be tariffs or checks on

goods coming from GB to NI that

are not going on to Ireland, that’s

the whole point. The great thing

that’s been misunderstood about

this whole thing is—there will not

be checks, there will not be checks,

and I speak as the prime minister of

the United Kingdom and a passion-

ate unionist, there will not be checks

on goods going from Northern

Ireland to Great Britain! Because

we’re the government of the UK,

and we will not institute, or enact

such checks. The idea that Tayto

crisps from Tandragee are going to

be affected by some process is just

nonsense, so actually Northern Ire-

land has got a great deal. You keep

free movement, you keep access to

the Single Market, but you also, as

it says in the deal, have unfettered

access to GB. We can also come out

and do Free Traders [sic].

But saying doesn’t make it so. The

Brexit divorce deal of October 17 al-

lowed Northern Ireland to remain

“aligned” with the EU’s single mar-

ket, but also to somehow remain part

of the UK’s custom territory, meaning

it would supposedly benefit from any

future free trade deals. Obviously, in

order to strike free trade deals, other

countries would have to be assured that

the origin of goods in the UK market

was certain, and the UK would have to

carry out checks on all goods coming

from Northern Ireland to make sure

they weren’t coming from the Repub-

lic, i.e., from the EU. Checks on goods

would also have to be performed the

other way around, on goods coming

from Britain into Northern Ireland.

When Johnson made these claims, for

months, he either didn’t know what he

was talking about—which is possible—

or he was lying. Also likely.

Since Johnson’s proposed with-

drawal agreement will commit the EU

(in the form of the Republic of Ire-

land) to check on goods coming from

Northern Ireland to make sure they are

coming from Northern Ireland and not

England or Scotland or Wales, a border

will also have to be operated between

the North and the Republic. Anne Mc-

Gregor, chief executive of the Northern

Ireland Chamber of Commerce, char-

acterizes the arrangement thus:

The Prime Minister’s current deal

effectively gives Northern Ireland

two borders.... Anyone with a

vested interest in the Northern Ire-

land economy [needs] to recognise

the major risks to business growth

and job creation and the serious con-

sequences for young people seeking

a career in Northern Ireland.

Ironically, the arrogance of Cameron

and Johnson—in conjunction with the

self-defeating stupidity of the DUP—

may well do what a hundred years of

killing couldn’t. Ireland was partitioned

in 1921, and it may be that next year, or

soon after, a border poll is held that will

bring about a United Ireland. The DUP

lost two seats in the December elec-

tion: in North Belfast Nigel Dodds was

unseated by Sinn Féin’s John Finucane

(who benefited from a pro-Remain al-

liance with the Social Democratic and

Labour Party, or SDLP; the Green Party

stood aside), and in South Belfast Emma

Little Pengelly lost to the SDLP’s Claire

Hanna (with Sinn Féin and the Green

Party standing aside). Following the

election, Mary Lou McDonald, the Sinn

Féin president, said, “It is now impos-

sible to ignore the growing demand for

a referendum on Irish unity and I want

to reiterate Sinn Féin’s call for the Irish

government to establish an all-Ireland

forum on Irish unity without delay.”

The rationale for holding a refer-

endum after twenty years of relative

peace is strong. Since the two commu-

nities in Northern Ireland now have

comparable sizes (the last census, in

2011, puts the figures at 40.8 percent

Catholic and 41.6 percent non-Catholic

Christians), the decision on whether or

not to join the Republic will also be one

of whether to rejoin the EU. The old bi-

nary national and religious distinctions

would be complicated with economic

questions, and questions about whether

the Northern Irish want to be yoked to

insular self-defeating Little England-

ers who couldn’t care less about them,

or to the largest single market in the

world, which, for whatever its faults,

was founded on the postwar ideals of

peace and fraternity and prosperity.

Where I grew up, Mid Ulster, the

member of Parliament since the late

1990s was Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuin-

ness, a leader of the IRA. At a dinner

once, I was seated next to a lawyer

who’d worked for George Mitchell,

the former American senator who ne-

gotiated the Good Friday Agreement,

and she told me that McGuinness was

responsible, personally, for the deaths

of three hundred people. I didn’t need

to be told, but it was better than being

buttonholed at a friend’s wedding years

ago by an American literary agent

eager to tell me that he’d just signed up

a countryman of mine, “a great states-

man” named Gerry Adams, another

alleged IRA leader. American igno-

rance is one thing; imperial arrogance

is another. And it’s imperial arrogance

that is leading my country, again, into

ruin. There will be bloodshed, and the

blood will be on Boris Johnson’s hands.

No matter how many lies he tells, or

Latin tags he quotes, or stupid jokes he

cracks, that blood will not wash off. Q

—December 19, 2019

This article originally appeared in

somewhat different form on the NYR

Daily.

LETTERS

NOT SO GLORIOUS

To the Editors:

Robert Kuttner is only half right when he

says, “But the bloodless Glorious Revolu-

tion went beyond those concessions and

began the tradition of constitutional de-

mocracy” [“Blaming Liberalism,” NYR,

November 21, 2019]. The Glorious Revolu-

tion may have begun the tradition of con-

stitutional democracy, but it was far from

bloodless. Parliament’s choice for king,

William of Orange, and the Stuart claim-

ant, King James II, fought a vicious war in

Ireland to decide who would rule England.

The war lasted from 1689 to 1691, and the

consequences still reverberate in Ireland

and the United Kingdom.

John K. Collins

Winnipeg, Canada

CORRECTIONS

In Eamon Duffy’s “Sacred Glamour”

[NYR, December 5, 2019], Pope John

Paul II’s visit to Canterbury Cathedral

should have been dated 1982, not 1979.

In Joan Acocella’s “Souls in Single File”

[NYR, December 19, 2019], Yuri Gagarin

was incorrectly identified as the cosmo-

naut who manned Sputnik, the first arti-

ficial earth satellite, in 1957. Sputnik was

unmanned. Gagarin’s famous flight was on

Vostok 1 in 1961.

Letters to the Editor: [email protected]. All other

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or visit http://www.nyrb.com

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