Do they do it deliberately or are we just stupid? I’m referring to the way politicians find a term or expression and beat it mercilessly until the public can barely recognize it, let alone know what it means.
A good example is the term ‘backstop’. This literally means a screen or fence that’s used in sport to stop a ball from leaving the field of play. In the past year or so of UK-EU negotiations, it’s come to refer to an if-all-else-fails course of action. In December of 2017, the EU and the UK agreed that, should there not be another (and, God willing, better) solution to the British border in Ireland, the north of Ireland would effectively remain in the EU customs union. In this way, the present invisible border would continue.
Fast forward to March 2018 and you have the then UK Brexit minister, David Davis declare that the UK accepted the need for a backstop – except it couldn’t be the one the EU was speaking of. So what had been agreed between the EU and the UK in December still remained, but it just couldn’t take the form the EU was suggesting. Keen to show his credentials, shadow Brexit Minister Keith Starmer announced: “It [the backstop] is a political document subject to negotiation and will not have legal force unless and until it is ratified – which is by no means a done deal.”
Slippery, Virginia, is a mild word to use in describing them. But there’s more.
In June 2018, Theresa May declared that the backstop plan would not extend beyond December 2021.
In July 2018 in the House of Commons, the DUP’s Nigel Dodds asked Theresa May to “reaffirm her stance against the EU backstop”. The British prime minister told the DUP’s real leader that she continued to reject the EU interpretation of the backstop, which would mean regulatory alignment between Norhern Ireland and the Republic.”It would have effectively carved Northern Ireland away from the rest of the UK and remains totally unacceptable.” In other words, there could be no backstop agreement that meant the border being in the middle of the Irish Sea.
Now – how’s that for an effortless reverse flip? Just when you thought you knew what the backstop was and what it had agreed, suddenly it’s time-limited and then it’s something that can’t be accepted, because it’d cut off the north from Mother Britain. What had been a reassuringly healthy term had been beaten within an inch of its life and drained of meaning.
And now? Well, now the vogue term is “No agreement.” More and more politicians are asking questions about what preparation has been made should the UK crash out of the EU in March 2019 with no agreement. Were that to happen, the notion of maintaining an invisible border between the EU and the UK (aka the south of Ireland and the north) would be a non-starter. The dreaded hard border would become a must.
It seems that, so far, there’s less ambiguity around the term “No deal.” As Theresa May might have put it, “No deal means no deal”. Or, if you like facing up to acts and their consequence, no deal means political and economic disaster for Ireland.
But let’s remember the story of the farmer who, each morning, would lead his donkey and cart to the front of the house and hit the donkey’s nose a crack with a brush-handle. When asked by a neighbour what he thought he was doing, the farmer replied “Getting the donkey’s attention.”
Likewise, after a year or two of post-Brexit chaos, it’s possible that the impact of Brexit will have secured the attention of unionist Brexiteers. That done, they may well see the virtues of what was once unthinkable: an economic and a political united Ireland.
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