Distributed to Congress by Irish National Caucus
The DUP is spouting rubbish on Brexit because they don’t understand
it
The DUP has denied it will agree to checks in the Irish Sea
Brian Feeney. Irish News. Belfast. Wednesday, September 18, 2019.
You’d wonder why anyone here takes seriously the nonsense DUP MPs spout every
time they speak about Brexit on radio or TV.
It may be because, with the distinguished exception of local
BBC’s Economics and Business Editor, John Campbell, most interviewers
don’t have enough knowledge of the detail of borders, customs and so on,
to avoid bursting out laughing when the likes of Jeffrey Donaldson or
Sammy Wilson deliver another load of garbage.
It’s been going on now for over three years. Donaldson, self-appointed
expert on imaginary technology at frontiers, repeatedly assured
interviewers and listeners that trade would be ‘frictionless’. He gave the
US-Canada border as an example. That proved to be untrue. He then
gave the Norway-Sweden border as an example; also untrue. He could not
name any device which would successfully monitor vehicles and
their contents, let alone animals alive or dead crossing a border. Despite
EU officials examining in vain every border that exists, Donaldson
kept insisting with no evidence whatsoever that such technology does
exist. It doesn’t.
His equally evidentially challenged colleague Spluttering Sammy, a man who
looks as if he doesn’t know whether to be angry
or indignant, regularly dumped similar garbage loads, though with
more sound and fury signifying nothing. The truth is no one in
the DUP understands the EU legal order. All they do is parrot the
equally ignorant Conservative Brexiteers whom they revere.
What suckers they are.
Tony Blair’s former chief of staff and general factotum, Jonathan Powell,
who does understand the EU legal order, admirably summed up the trilemma
in a letter to the Times last week. He wrote that, since the UK is leaving
the Customs Union and the Single Market, and Johnson apparently
favors a Canada-style trade deal, then, ‘there will have to be a Border
somewhere. It can be between Northern Ireland and the Republic,
between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, or between the island of
Ireland and the rest of the EU.’
As Powell acknowledged, the Republic is staying in the EU’s Single Market and
Customs Union, therefore, ‘to suggest that a common agricultural
area for the island and some cobbled-together ideas about trusted trader
schemes solves [the Border], is nonsense.’
On the other hand, as the Republic’s finance minister Pascal Donohoe said
on Monday, the UK intends to abandon EU regulations to
acquire trading advantages. In short, despite the mendacious spin
emanating from Downing Street, the UK is miles from a resolution.
Furthermore, even if Johnson proposed something workable, which he won’t,
he couldn’t get it through Westminster because he has no majority for
anything. In any case, Britain has not advanced any proposals on anything.
There has been no progress at all as the aftermath of Monday’s lunch
fiasco made clear.
The most depressing aspect of the performance of the DUP is not
that they’re lying; they’re not. They unload garbage because
they don’t know what they’re talking about. They have never uttered a
single syllable on their own initiative. Instead, they took as
gospel rubbish spewed out by men in the Conservative party who have
no knowledge of the EU, but more importantly, couldn’t care
less about anything or anyone on this island as the evidence of the
referendum and Theresa May’s ‘red lines’ demonstrates
conclusively. Rather than think for themselves, or for the benefit of
people here, the DUP’s MPs buy all this garbage and then regurgitate it on
the airwaves here. They are the Conservative party’s useful idiots,
stooges.
Now belatedly poor Donaldson is being sent out to prepare the
party faithful for a U-turn on regulatory divergence. Conceding it
on agri-food, as he did on RTÉ, means conceding the principle of
no divergence on anything. What’s the argument against
divergence on alcohol, tobacco or pharmaceuticals? Why is he doing
it? He knows that’s the direction of travel in Johnson’s cabinet. How
far will the DUP go? Anywhere Johnson wants.
END.
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