OK, class, your attention, please. I have a question for you today. Actually I had the same question for you yesterday and the day before that, but I didn’t think I should inflict it on my faithful readers – life is hard enough. But today, after the visit of the two men who are arm-wrestling as to who becomes leader of the Tory party and so British prime minister, I think the situation demands that the question be put on the table and we all gather round to look at it as it lies there panting.
Q: Why don’t our media – I mean the guys and gals in our own little green tormented corner – take a hammer and nail the likes of Jeremy and Boris to the wall?
Because it’s the obvious thing to do, providing you haven’t put your journalistic principles in your back pocket and forgotten where they are.
The fact is, Jeremy and Boris during their visit here said sweet damn all beyond “I am a unionist and I’m going to magic away the backstop.”
No, sorry, I do Jeremy a disservice. He maintained that we could get rid of the backstop because we have electronic stuff that’ll allow unimpeded movement and trade across “what the Germans call ‘the invisible border’”.
(Has Jeremy gone mad? We’ve been using the term ‘the invisible border’ forever. The Germans call it ‘bustenhalter’. Or something.
Presenter Crawley asked Jeremy to give an instance of where in the world this technology allowed free movement of cars and trucks, Jeremy immediately said “On the border between Switzerland and France.”
Now if you’ve read my blog from yesterday, you’ll know that the Financial Times has detailed how, even when mimicking EU rules again and again, Switzerland still has to put in place a hard border between it and France. So why didn’t Crawley grab ex-Head Boy at Charterhouse Jeremy by the shirt and point out that he either didn’t know what he was talking about or that he was deliberately lying? It was left to Retail NI’s Aodhán Connolly to point out that Hunt had just told a whopper.
The backstop is at the heart of the Brexit problem. British politicians like Jeremy and Boris are so intent on insisting there can be no border in the Irish Sea (there already is one, guys), they get away with claiming they have a solution for the Irish border.
You don’t, guys. And if our media people don’t yell “Liar!” every time you say you do, they’re in dereliction of their duty as journalists.
That famous Irish Tory Edmund Burke said it best: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” And yes, there are journalists who are good men. And women.
But if you think, just because they smile and chuckle and say they value the UK, that Jeremy and Boris aren’t determined to unleash economic evil on the UK and Ireland and the EU, you haven’t been paying attention.
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