By Cameron Hilditch
Friday, October 02, 2020
Earlier this week, the House of Commons in Westminster
passed the Internal Markets Bill, a law that asserts British sovereignty over
sovereign British territory. Fairly uncontroversial, right? Downright
tautological, even.
Not according to the European Union. As I wrote about here,
the British government made an ill-advised decision last year to sign on to a
very bad Withdrawal Agreement with the European Union. The text of this
agreement allowed the EU to economically annex Northern Ireland, one of the
four constituent nations of the United Kingdom, and to keep it under the
European customs and regulation regime. The EU’s pretense for demanding
Northern Ireland as their pound of flesh during Brexit negotiations was that a fluid
and permeable border between Northern Ireland and the Republic is impossible
otherwise. The consequent erection of border infrastructure would, we are told,
risk a flare-up of the horrific violence that has ravaged the island of Ireland
since the United Kingdom was partitioned in 1921. The contention that only
European control of Northern Ireland is necessary for avoiding a hard border is
false, as the EU itself has admitted.
But it’s a politically useful story to tell in order to gain leverage over the
U.K. during negotiations.
Discovering that such a situation is in fact wholly
unworkable for a fully independent and sovereign nation, the British government
passed the Internal Markets Bill. As the U.K.’s Northern Ireland minister
Brandon Lewis has admitted, the bill violates the Withdrawal Agreement by
reclaiming British sovereignty over Northern Ireland.
Needless to say, the EU is not pleased by this turn of
events. They served Boris Johnson’s government with a “letter of formal notice”
this week that could eventually lead to a case against the British government
being brought at the European Court of Justice. According to Brussels, the U.K.
has breached Article V of the Withdrawal Agreement, which obliges both parties
to work together in good faith. Appealing once again to the tried-and-true
“peace in Ireland canard,” they are attempting to characterize the British
government’s actions as endangering the agreement that brought an end to
violence in Northern Ireland. The EU Commission protested, “The EU does not
accept the argument that the aim of the draft bill is to protect the Good
Friday (Belfast) agreement. In fact, it is of the view that it does the
opposite.”
Thankfully, the EU seems finally to be receiving
diminishing returns from their relentless appeal to this manifest falsehood.
The legal process on which they have just embarked against the U.K. would take
years to reach resolution. Happily, the United Kingdom will have completely
extricated itself from the legal order of the EU (including the jurisdiction of
ECJ) by the end of this year. The threats issued this week are purely political
in nature, made in the full knowledge by all parties that they cannot be
carried out. I suppose that the purpose of all this bluster from the European
perspective is to show the British that they “mean business,” but all it really
demonstrates is how out of practice they are when it comes to treating
countries on their own continent as diplomatic equals. The time is fast
approaching when the EU will no longer be able to threaten and bully the U.K.
into line with the prospect of sanctions legal action from within its own
technocratic apparatus. These “legal actions” really amount to no more than a
final, impotent temper tantrum thrown by the Commission in response to the
approaching, ineluctable advent of British independence.
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