Who’d take lessons from the IRA’s chum Corbyn on Brexit and the Irish border?
THE burden of responsibility on Theresa May’s shoulders as she attempts to negotiate Britain’s exit from the EU is as onerous as any British prime minister has endured since World War II.
But until I spoke to one of her closest advisers a couple of days ago, I hadn’t realised the full extent of it.
He pointed out that she is conducting negotiations in the awareness that the alternative government to her administration, if it failed in its task and fell, is led by a man without the slightest regard for any of the institutions of the British state. Jeremy Corbyn would be intolerably, perhaps lethally, irresponsible as a negotiator on behalf of our national interests.
As if to put this point in the sharpest perspective, this week Mr Corbyn is due to visit Belfast and the border with the Republic of Ireland — currently the most vexed issue in the Brexit negotiations.
As Leader of the Opposition, Corbyn is absolutely entitled to engage in such political excursions. That doesn’t alter the fact he is a bitterly controversial figure in Northern Ireland because of his longstanding sympathy for those who committed atrocious murders in the province.
Divided
Just weeks after the bombing of the Brighton Grand Hotel during the 1984 Conservative conference, which murdered five people (though not, as the IRA had intended, Margaret Thatcher), Corbyn invited two suspected IRA terrorists to the House of Commons. And when the Brighton bomber, Patrick Magee, came to face justice at the Old Bailey, Corbyn picketed the court.
His supporters claim ‘Jeremy’ had only ever been working for harmony and peace. They are either lying or ignorant: what he sought was total victory for the Republicans, not a settlement respecting both sides of the deeply divided community.
That is why Corbyn was one of the few MPs who, in 1985, voted in the Commons against the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the first legislative step towards the creation of such an accord.
In the same sectarian spirit, his closest political friend and now Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell — who at an Irish Republican gathering in 2003 called for the terrorists who used ‘bombs and bullets’ to be ‘honoured’ — opposed the original negotiations to set up a powersharing assembly (the basis for what eventually became known as the Good Friday Agreement).
It’s hardly surprising that last week McDonnell had to abandon an address he was to have made to the Prison Officers’ Association’s annual conference: the Northern Ireland delegation were furious he had been invited, since 29 of their colleagues had been murdered by the terrorists whom McDonnell celebrated.
Corbyn is expected to speak at Queen’s University in Belfast this week. It also happens to be where a 29-year- old law lecturer, Edgar Graham, was shot dead by the IRA in 1983.
The Labour leader might have forgotten, but those who daily live with the consequences have not.
The past lies particularly heavy in these parts — and inevitably Brexit is caught up in the historical debate.
The people of the Republic of Ireland had every reason to feel alarmed and even angered by the UK’s vote to leave the EU. While this had no implications for the Common Travel Area between the Republic and the UK (this has been in place since 1922, has nothing to do with Brussels, and will continue), there was huge concern, especially among farmers, that Brexit could endanger cross-border trade once the UK was outside the EU’s customs union and Single Market.
To reassure the Irish, the British Government guaranteed that, come what may, there would be no new physical infrastructure on the border between North and South: this would be obligatory as part of the final trade deal still to be negotiated between the UK and the EU.
That’s all very well, said the EU: but Mrs May’s ‘red lines’ include being outside the customs union and Single Market. So, Brussels asks: without additional physical border checks, how will each side make sure that nothing is coming through which doesn’t breach what might become different regulatory systems?
Anyone who read Robert Hardman’s report from Felixstowe in Saturday’s Mail — which revealed how speedily and effortlessly this vast port processes £80 billion of worldwide imports a year — will understand just how much technology has transformed the customs business.
Sensible
The volume crossing the Irish border is minuscule by comparison: at £3 billion a year, it is equivalent to little more than 0.1 per cent of current total external EU trade. And Irish customs currently makes physical checks on just 1 per cent of that.
But to avoid any need for additional infrastructure at the North-South border post-Brexit, the British have made a number of suggestions, the most sensible being the enhancement of existing technology in the form of electronic customs arrangements, vehicle numberplate reading cameras and drones.
These are part of the current intelligenceled operations to detect smuggling: there are such cameras in operation today on the main cross- border highway, as smugglers seek to capitalise on differing excise and VAT rates prevailing in the North and the Republic.
Immediately after Brexit, the then Irish taoiseach, Enda Kenny, committed his administration to intensive collaboration with HM Revenue and Customs to develop such a technological way to meet the requirement for an ‘invisible’ border. But last year Kenny was succeeded by Leo Varadkar: he instantly abandoned these discussions — and cut similar lines of communication between Dublin and the office of Arlene Foster, the admirably pragmatic leader of Northern Ireland’s largest party, the Democratic Unionists.
Instead, Varadkar has thrown in his country’s lot entirely with the European Commission. So he faithfully echoes Brussels’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, who has consistently ridiculed the British idea of a technological solution.
One British Cabinet minister suggested a reason for this to me: unlike Kenny, the precocious Veradkar is more interested in gaining one of the glittering prizes available within the European establishment. He would love to become Ireland’s first president of the European Council.
Outrageous
Barnier’s motivation is more brutally practical. He is telling Mrs May, in effect, that the only way to honour her commitment to avoid a so-called ‘hard border’ in Ireland is for the UK to remain subject to the EU customs union and totally compliant with Single Market regulations (certainly as far as they affect agricultural produce).
In other words, the UK would be under the EU’s regulatory controls but, having left the EU’s political institutions, with no say in their composition.
This outrageous proposition is backed up with an even more disgraceful assertion: that any alternative UK suggestion of extra cameras or drones even some way from the border would be in abrogation of the Good Friday Agreement, and ‘risk a return to terrorism’.
This has been the line of the former European Commissioner Lord (Chris) Patten, along with other peers who have voted in the Lords to stymie Mrs May’s Brexit legislation.
This spurious hawking of the Good Friday Agreement by those trying to force the UK to remain bound by the EU customs union and Single Market has been comprehensively debunked by, of all people, Labour’s Shadow Trade Secretary, Barry Gardiner.
In a private address in Brussels a couple of months ago, Gardiner said: ‘It doesn’t mean that putting in a normal border relationship when one side is no longer in the EU will bring back paramilitary activity — that is to confuse cause and effect.
‘People have played up the issue of the Irish border . . . because it is hugely in the Republic of Ireland’s economic interest to make sure that there is no tariff and no external border there.’
Unfortunately for Gardiner — a close colleague of Corbyn — the BBC got hold of a tape of the meeting and he was skewered on BBC1’s The Andrew Marr Show yesterday by that superb interviewer Emma Barnett.
‘Do you stand by your remarks that people are playing up the Irish border for political reasons?’ she asked. Coherent answer came there none.
It’s only a pity that Ms Barnett was not able to ask Corbyn how a man with his record could ever hope to gain the trust of all the people of Northern Ireland, were he the prime minister negotiating Brexit.