British sausage-makers who export their sausages to Marks and Spencer in Paris or anywhere else in Europe do so in frozen form. That’s a rough and ready food safety rule which really shouldn’t be causing such convulsion. Ireland has long produced excellent sausages, bacon, black puddings and ham. Much of the mince and cheddar cheese we eat from Tesco’s comes from Northern Irish cows transformed into meat and dairy products by the highly-advanced food processing industry in the Republic.
So, supermarkets in Belfast or Derry can easily be supplied with the identical tasting sausages eaten in Bury or Brighton. But Johnson needs a permanent war with the EU to prove that the Battle of Brexit is not over and Britain is still in conflict with Europe.
One of the shrewdest Brexit ideologues is Alistair Heath, Editor of the Sunday Telegraph. In October 2016, Heath wrote under the dramatic headline “Why It’s Time For A New Campaign For Brexit” that “There is no such thing as permanent victory in politics. History never ends; triumph is fleeting; majorities can turn into minorities and orthodoxies are inevitably built on foundations of sand.”
Heath’s Trotskyist or, since he spent some of his childhood in France, his Robespierrean appeal for permanent revolutionary struggle and the elimination of all opposition to the new Brexit order is also Johnson’s political necessity.
Most people would welcome an easing back of Brexit maximisation – a drift to some common-sense compromise to allow normal commerce, travel, working in Europe and hiring European workers here if business needs them to make money.
But the more that happens the more the question arises – what on earth was the point of the ultra-hard Brexit decided on by Boris Johnson and made operational by Lord (David) Frost?
Gordon Brown, who never found a good word about the EU in government and sought to undermine every pro-EU move by Tony Blair, is now saying that the UK should one day rejoin Europe. This is a direct challenge to the current Labour line that Brexit is over and Labour must avoid mentioning the B-word.
Brown should not be underestimated. His TV and radio appearances promoting his idea of vaccinating the world have been sufficiently solid and impressive to have now been taken over by Johnson.
Brown thinks strategically and long-term. As Blair’s Chancellor and successor as PM, he sensed the mood change against the EU. He never disguised his Euroscepticism and opposition to greater EU integration between 1997 and 2010. If he now senses that Brexit is not a success for Britain, his political antennae should not be too quickly rubbished.
It is this that frightens Alistair Heath and the league of Brexit loyalists in parts of the press, on Tory backbenches and, it is assumed, in red wall seats. All these supporters have to be kept permanently mobilised, and look to Johnson as their Lenin – still working tirelessly to make real the Brexit revolution.
Early in May it was the war of the whelks in the Channel, with the despatch of the Royal Navy to threaten French fishing boats with a new Trafalgar if they kept demanding access to centuries-old fishing waters.
It is telling Sir Elton John and Sir Simon Rattle and thousands of young musicians they cannot any longer tour in Europe. It was the boasting about vaccinations and the surreal claim that Britain was better equipped to handle the pandemic thanks to Brexit – a claim that now seems plain silly, as the UK’s Covid death rates and open door to the Delta (or so-called Indian) variant makes us Europe’s worst protected nation.
At the G7, Downing Street was briefing that Emmanuel Macron told Boris Johnson Northern Ireland was not in the UK. But Macron was making the point every student of the British constitution knows: that Northern Ireland is not part of Great Britain. It never has been and Northern Irish politicians have rejected laws on gays, abortion and other issues long after they were accepted on the mainland.
Biden, the most pro-Irish US president since John F Kennedy, will impose some truce on Johnson. But the Northern Ireland sausage row is not about bangers. It is about the necessity for Johnson to maintain all of the nation in a state of tension over Brexit.
Above all he wants the main opposition, Labour, to say nothing about Brexit. Labour hasn’t got electoral skin in Northern Ireland politics, but the Good Friday Agreement, which the DUP regarded as a “capitulation” and are determined to weaken, would destroy one of Labour’s most important political achievements in recent history.
As long as Labour is silent, Johnson is winning. No one dares question his Brexit revolution and ask if it is all he says it is cracked up to be. Finding words that put Johnson under pressure and speak for the majority of British citizens, including those in Northern Ireland, who would like Brexit to calm down to allow compromises to emerge, should now be a task that a Labour Party that aspires to govern must begin to think about and discuss.
Commentaires