Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness

If you follow this blog but don't bother with Twitter and other social media, you may have missed some of my more recent articles. As phase 1 of the Brexit negotiations struggled to a slightly chaotic conclusion, I looked at some of the features of an emerging deal, at Conservative Home . I argued that 'convergence', which has subsequently become 'alignment', was not necessarily the same as membership of the Customs Union or Single Market. "All the fundamentals of Britain’s final deal with Brussels should apply equally across all its regions.  But if there are parts of the economy that benefit from harmonising regulations with the EU, without compromising the United Kingdom’s integrity, we should be clever and pragmatic enough to show some flexibility." At the website, Reaction ,  I examined how a deal could affect the 'principle of consent', which underpins the Good Friday Agreement. The Irish government's attitude to consent re...

Last week, the veteran Tory Europhile, Ken Clarke, argued that if the UK leaves the EU Customs Union the best solution “is to have a border down the Irish Sea”. His intervention appalled unionists and delighted nationalists, who - in connivance with the Alliance Party - have been using Brexit to try to loosen Northern Ireland’s ties with Great Britain and edge it closer to the Republic of Ireland. Mr Clarke has made many constructive arguments over the years, from the moderate wing of the Conservatives, but his comments about Northern Ireland have been pitifully few and often betrayed a patronising disdain for this part of the UK. After his former party leader, David Cameron, formed an electoral pact with Ulster Unionists, Clarke told the Daily Telegraph, “you can always do a deal with an Ulsterman, but it’s not the way to run a modern, sophisticated society”. Nationalists will applaud anyone who supports their schemes to dilute Northern Ireland’s position in the UK. It is All...

When Theresa May’s speechwriters pondered this year’s keynote address to the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, they couldn’t have been short of potential material. Businesses and their representative organisations daily pour over every utterance from the Prime Minister and her colleagues, in an attempt to decode how the Brexit negotiations might progress. The Conservative government appears to be riven with infighting and, if it falls, Labour and Jeremy Corbyn threaten to upend British society and the existing economic order. The chancellor continues to wrestle with the insoluble algebra of keeping unemployment low and cutting the deficit, while boosting productivity and raising wages.   That’s probably why Mrs May’s speech largely avoided each of these big issues and instead reached for a series of well worn accusations, directed against Russia. It was the usual thing; espionage, destabilising eastern European states, weaponising information. “I have a very simple message for Russ...

Last month the government published its Brexit position paper on ‘Northern Ireland and Ireland’ (by which it meant the Irish Republic). It was hardly a scintillating document, but at least it tried to imagine how a ‘seamless and frictionless’ border might work in practice. In response, the EU Commission issued a set of truculent and unhelpful ‘ Guiding principles for the dialogue on Ireland / Northern Ireland ’. Like the British paper, it filled a great deal of space referencing the Good Friday Agreement and emphasised the importance of the peace process, but it pointedly refused to ‘put forward solutions for the Irish border’. ‘The onus to propose solutions’, it said, lies squarely with the UK. What the commission didn’t say directly, but its negotiator Michel Barnier acknowledged in a press conference, was that the UK did propose solutions, which the EU rejected out of hand. The British paper made it clear that the government sees no need for a so-called ‘hard border’ from ...

We don’t yet know how Brexit will affect Northern Ireland exactly, but the referendum result certainly revived the nationalist trope that Irish unity is ‘inevitable’. The Republic’s national parliament recently published plans for a forum “to achieve the peaceful reunification of Ireland”, Sinn Fein blithely assure unionists that the “British identity” will be protected in a thirty-two county state and newspaper columnists rush to tell readers that the fourth green field will soon “bloom again”. One particularly excitable author, Kevin Meagher, a former special adviser to Shaun Woodward, (remind me again why unionists didn’t trust that former secretary of state), even called his book “ A United Ireland: Why unification is inevitable ”.    In response, unionists have challenged nationalism’s “self-regarding, single certainty” in a series of astute articles. At the dissenter blog, a leading academic took apart the question of a “United Ireland, inevitability an...

Previously, I argued that there are no longer any ‘leavers’ or ‘remainers’: just Brexit deniers and Brexit realists.  The UK will leave the EU and the government has outlined in reasonable detail its plan for the future.  Northern Ireland’s decision-makers, whether or not they comprise a devolved Executive, can either act as if they're still fighting the referendum campaign, or start to plan to make the best of our future after Brexit. On behalf of the think-tank Global Britain , and local businesses including Sandelford Policy , David Hoey and I have written a report describing “ An Agenda for Northern Ireland After Brexit ”.  This sets out a framework to address some of the policy challenges presented locally by Brexit. At The Dissenter, David sets out in detail why all levels of government in Northern Ireland should “stop talking and start doing” .  Many of our most pressing local issues are economic and many of the issues that we’ll face after Brexit ...