20 yrs ago we achieved something we were told was impossible. That Brextremists are now willing to put the Good Friday Agreement at risk is deeply troubling
TWENTY years ago today, something miraculous came together and the Good Friday Agreement was born.
Securing peace in Northern Ireland was incredibly difficult but it ranks as one of the greatest and most important achievements of the last Labour government.
Almost from the day Tony Blair took office, Northern Ireland became a priority, and it never stopped being a priority.
Building on work begun under John Major, we were convinced a peace once described as impossible was there for the taking, provided we got the different sides to agree to certain principles, then leave the rest to hard work, commitment and negotiation.
There were moments in the months and years after when it still felt like everything could fall apart but a remarkable group of people on all sides of the debate, with support from around the world, was determined to prevent that.
Now, as we mark the 20th anniversary of the Agreement, at a time the political process remains fragile, there is the terrifying prospect that Brexit could turn back the clock and put at risk the peace and prosperity that all that hard work helped deliver.
Terrifying not least because it is clear that to the Brextremist ideologues, no price is too high to get out of Europe, and that would include an Agreement that to them, today, is more of an irritant than an essential building block of peace.
To hear Jacob Rees-Mogg say that the solution to the unsolved border issue is for Ireland to follow the UK out of the EU, or Daniel Hannan say that the Agreement was a consequence not a cause of peace, is to realise not merely how little they understand the issues at stake, but how little they care alongside their blinding passion for Brexit at any cost.
It is one thing, however, to have hard-right anti-European ideologues paying so little heed to the dangers to the Agreement.
It is quite another when the Prime Minister, her embarrassment of a Foreign Secretary and her Brexit ministers are playing the same dangerous game.
There is a good reason why both sides of the negotiations are struggling to find a solution to the border issue. There isn’t one.
How, when we are out of the EU, and Ireland remains in, can the only land border between two separate political and economic entities be free of any border infrastructure, or “frictionless”?
And if a solution is found to prevent a border on the island of Ireland, it effectively moves to the Irish Sea – with huge implications for Scotland.
Theresa May and Brextremists who drive her strategy are hoping that simply by agreeing to the desire not to have such a border, they can get us out by March 2019, and leave the detail to the transition period.
But that is playing with fire. For us to leave, without knowing exactly how these new border arrangements will work for new times, would be reckless, irresponsible and dangerous.
It is one of the many reasons why the deal she brings back should be put to a people’s vote, given even the Cabinet cannot agree on what “Brexit Means Brexit” actually means.
In any event, the Good Friday Agreement wasn’t about cameras and trade but a political settlement that recognised the rights of both unionists and nationalists, and the importance of economic and cultural links between the North and the Republic.
That there are people willing to undermine that is deeply troubling.
I find it incredible that May is prepared to risk going down in history as the Tory Prime Minister who not only undid Margaret Thatcher’s project of completing the Single Market, but also undermined Major’s achievements in Northern Ireland.
But while the Tories are the architects of Brexit, as things stand, it is the Labour opposition which history will write as its handmaiden.
Jeremy Corbyn is not in power. But he does have power, not least given the Parliamentary arithmetic that followed May’s doomed attempt to win landslide support for hard Brexit.
Yet he seems reluctant to use that power to shift the government’s course. Indeed, he seems as hellbent on Brexit at any price as she does.
He prides himself on being the most left-wing leader Labour have ever had. So why has he done so little to challenge the drift to this hard-right hard Brexit that the Johnsons, Goves, Duncan-Smiths, Redwoods, Rees-Moggs and Farages have forced on May?
We really are in the most extraordinary position where most MPs, left to their own devices, would vote against what the government are proposing, by a considerable margin, but the frontbenchers of two main parties are locked in a deadly embrace to deliver something they both acknowledge will damage our lives and living standards. It is madness.
There are millions of people in Scotland and across the UK who share that view – that this is madness.
Why are there so few in Parliament speaking up for them?