‘Any port in a storm’ is the watchword of those who defy the democratic mandate won by Brexit in 2016.
Whether it’s frightening old ladies with tales of unavailable medicine if Britain reverts to trading with the EU27 on the same basis as most of the rest of the world, or spooking the healthy over a shortage of apples (though most people never eat one). But the most enduring has been the border between Ireland and the British colony of just six counties in the northeast of Ireland.
The proximate cause is the decision of the citizens of the north to remain in the EU, whilst the majority in the British state voted to leave. They did this despite the hardline unity-with-Britain parties – principally the DUP – campaigning hard for Brexit. The formerly viscerally anti-EU Sinn Fein was on the winning side in the north despite its support base being in a (narrowing) minority in the gerrymandered statelet. Thus, if people in the north want to remain in the European Union, the solution is obvious and achievable by democratic means – a border poll as provided for in the internationally agreed Good Friday Agreement – and the reunification of their country.
I have known the opposition Labour Party spokesman on Northern Ireland, Tony Lloyd, for more than 30 years as both an inveterate opponent of the EU and a vociferous champion of Irish unity. Extraordinarily, he has also now ruled out any incoming Labour government agreeing to such a border poll – despite the fact that his leader Jeremy Corbyn could in the past not have been closer to Irish republicanism! This decision is presumably driven by the forlorn hope that the DUP will one day side with Labour in a no-confidence vote in the Conservative government.
And so for a variety of historical and opportunistic reasons, Ireland has become the battlefield of all battlefields in Britain’s Brexit struggle with the EU over withdrawal. But both stage-armies are deploying straw-men.
“No hard border” goes the cry. But nobody will build a hard border, certainly not the British (for whom it would be a breach of the GFA). Certainly not the Irish government in Dublin. Would the EU really build a hard border in Ireland? Pigs would fly across it first.
“Brexit is helping the dissident IRA” is the latest canard. In fact, there has been dissident IRA violence in the north since the Omagh massacre not long after the Good Friday Agreement was signed, and it has never stopped since. Dissident republicans, in any case, cling to the previous republican position of withdrawal from the EU – they didn’t get the memos ending the war or accepting Brussels rule.