Ulster is not the Donbas of the European Union
The practical details of implementing the Northern Ireland Protocol are complex. Yesterday, the Government announced new ways of addressing them. But the key problem goes deeper. The Protocol divides the territory of a single nation, the United Kingdom. In this respect – though luckily not in scale or violence – it resembles the dispute over Ukraine. The EU plays the role of Russia; Northern Ireland is the Donbas region.
Like Brexit, the independence of Ukraine is an internationally recognised legal fact. But in both cases, this displeases some, including some within the independent territory. In Northern Ireland, a minority seeks a united Ireland. In the Donbas, a minority wants to be part of Russia.
In their respective cases, the EU and Russia are external powers trying to advance their interests. They have legitimate interests – trade rules in the first case, security in the second – but they take them much too far.
The EU claims it is upholding the Good Friday Agreement, although it had, and has, almost no role in that deal, which is not about the border. Indeed, the Protocol breaches the Agreement’s insistence on consent, making it impossible for Unionists to resume power-sharing.
Russia, in Vladimir Putin’s angry mind, has a misty historical right to all Ukraine, particularly the Donbas. He is killing thousands of Ukrainians to assert this fiction and sending thousands of his troops to their death.
I shall not extend the comparison to give Boris Johnson the heroic role of President Volodymyr Zelensky, but both men face a dilemma. Should they make any concessions to their unreasonable opponents? How much are their current actions compromised by past mistakes? In Ukraine’s case, Zelensky’s predecessors pretty much let Crimea go in 2014. In Britain’s case, Theresa May, spooked by the bogus “hard border” threat, gave the EU partition, for trade purposes, between Britain and Northern Ireland, thus negating sovereignty. When he took over as Prime Minister, Boris was rushing to get a deal, so he did not withdraw what Mrs May had offered.
Should either man now abandon something to buy peace? If the prospect of peace were genuine, perhaps the answer would be yes. But is it? All Putin’s actions indicate that he will stop killing only for tactical reasons. Unlike Mikhail Gorbachev with Margaret Thatcher, he is not a man with whom his opponents can do business.
Ursula von der Leyen is no Putin, being a pleasant, moderate woman with seven children, rather than a mass murderer. One hopes she and her Brussels colleagues will recognise, if only tacitly, that the anomaly of a border that splits the UK in the Irish Sea cannot ultimately survive Brexit. They should accept Liz Truss’s “red and green channel” proposals as a good transitional solution.
But the curse of the EU is its doctrinal rigidity. So far, it has not acknowledged British protests about how the thing works – or rather, doesn’t work. Since Brussels continues to insist that part of our independent country must forever be part of its single market, our Government is duty-bound to break free.
Last week, I attended the Grand
Lath. You may not have heard of it. I hadn’t. It is the main annual meeting of the Corporation of the Romney Marsh, in Kent. Once upon a time, these men were the first to reclaim large parts of this country’s land from the sea. They did it so well that, in 1258, Henry III empowered them with a formal charter. The Lords of the Levels and their “Jurats” (marsh farmers doing the hard work) ruled the place. Their court is still in the New Hall (built in the 1500s) in Dymchurch. They levied a tax called a scot (hence the phrase “scot-free”).
Even today, I was told, there remains a statute that allows the Corporation to hang anyone who pulls up a marsh thorn bush without permission: before modern engineering, thorn bushes packed with mud were the key defence against flood.
The Lords of the Levels lost their wider powers in the 1940s. Now the Environment Agency is in charge. But the Corporation remains a proud institution. Building a sea wall, draining the marshes and using the fertile alluvial soil from the rivers for productive agriculture was an astonishing medieval feat, creating prosperity, beautiful churches and new communities. The East Anglian fens and the Somerset levels followed their example. The marsh men’s descendants remain actively involved in protecting the marsh.
They think of themselves as fighting the sea. After all, the entire marsh is below sea level, and the coast is beset by strong currents round Dungeness Point, trying to break through. Its security must be defended, just as a nation’s security must be defended from invasion.
The other day, a senior executive of HSBC said that if Miami flooded because of climate change, it wouldn’t matter because it could be rescued. Look at Amsterdam, which emerged from the sea, he added. He was suspended from his post.
The Lords of the Levels would probably have welcomed him to their Grand Lath luncheon. They look unfavourably on the way the Environment Agency allows flooding as nature’s way. As Yvonne Wanstall, the Corporation’s clerk, put it to me, there is a difference between “the men who know the land and the men who think they know what’s best for the land”. As food security becomes an issue once more, it is time to prefer the former to the latter.