At least you can leave

A superb article; thank you. bjg

When I talked to kids about wave motion, I tried to be careful about using the example of waves at the beach. So very many of them had never been, I didn’t want to embarrass them. It really is unconscionable to deprive youth of their dreams of living and working abroad. I had some vague thoughts about, what was it? Something, something, Greece, something? Forget that! This was a powerful and heart-felt evocation of the moral values of the EU supporters.

Great piece, but a hard read. As a fifty-something, the product of an Irish father and English mother and holder of dual nationality, I admit I find it hard to recognise that England. But you are clearly living it, and it’s clearly ugly. To the bone.
Alas, I fear returning to Ireland may not be the answer either. It’s not a whole lot better here. Though I suppose you could take comfort in the fact that most of our civil service is just incompetent, as opposed to vicious. I wish you the best. And look forward to reading your book.

thanks Maria. I’ve already left, but thanks.

I hate to pile on, but I wonder how quickly your limited extra rights as an Irish person will be eroded if the troubles restart? The UK was vicious towards Irish people 30 years ago and I see no reason they won’t go back to that mindset …

I agree with everything you say. But those of us who are British and brown face most of that plus the being stuck on this island part.

Don’t get me wrong I am fighting for you guys every day. But every so often I just sit back and think that the most racist part of brexit is that I would never ever get citizenship of another European country by ancestry whereas every prominent brexiteer seems to have an escape route.

Britain has always been nasty and selfish. It has invaded more that 4 out of 5 countries in the world. Even the so-called welfare state of the early 1950’s was financed by stolen oil from Iran. Also, they were never committed to the EU and joined just to cause division and to be a glove puppet of the USA.
As Henry John Temple said “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow”.

Is this wrong? No-one knows.

The CTA is more of a gentleman’s agreement between the UK and Ireland than a treaty, they agree we are not “foreign”, since after all, we are one of the Home Nations.

But with Brexit happening, all bets may be off. If they actually crash out, things are going to get very bad indeed, and no-one knows what will happen.

Thank you, Maria. I feel pretty much the same – it’s heartbreaking. The only thing that gives me hope is that half of the British people – and everyone I know personally – seem to be utterly opposed to all this nonsensical nastiness. And 50% @ssholes and idiots is probably quite a common ratio in any country.

Why slander the mediocre?

@19 ‘One is the imperial nostalgic elderly white one….’

I think you will find that there is not much imperial nostalgia in Scotland, or the Welsh speaking parts of Wales*. There probably is some kind of imperial nostalgia in the North of Ireland, but it’s certainly not universal, and we all know what ‘areas’ (to use a euphemism) we would find that nostalgia in, don’t we? And why.

Do we think it’s a coincidence that Scotland, the North of Ireland and the Welsh speaking parts of Wales all voted Remain?

Do we think it’s a coincidence that all (literally all) of the Tory ‘hard Brexiteers’ are English?

Brexit is about many things, but a large part of it is imperial nostalgia amongst the English (and, I’m afraid, only the English) for their crappy racist Empire, and a desire to spark some life into the shambling corpse of the Empire’s successor, the Commonwealth (as well as blind worship for the American Empire, the true successor to the British version: c.f. Johnson and Farage fawning over Trump).

It’s all very well saying the cities are more ‘cosmopolitan’ without going into details but the fact is that these cities are now filled with immigrants and the children of immigrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, the West Indies and other ex-UK colonies. Countries which have a rather different view from the London based one about the alleged glories of Empire.

And as long as the truth about this Empire is kept from the English: as long as they are consistently lied to (lying by omission is still a lie) in their schools (with the state mandated curriculum) and their worthless media, this Empire nostalgia will continue with devastating consequences for the world (note the fuss recently when a Green MP entirely correctly described Churchill as a racist mass murderer, a viewpoint that is literally impossible to coherently argue against).

*Although the Welsh Assembly rejected May’s plan and voted to remain in the customs union.

@23
Fair point, although Liam Fox is in favour of May’s plan. I was really talking about those who openly or covertly salivate at the prospect of ‘No Deal’. Obviously Gove is made of sterner stuff, so to speak, but he also said: ‘”there have also been more benign empires, and in that I would include, almost pre-eminently, the British’.

It would be interesting for a social scientist to carry out a study on the Tory party, looking at the relationship between ‘hostility to the EU’ on the one hand and propensity to agree with the statement that ‘The British Empire had generally a positive impact on the world in the 19th and 20th centuries’ on the other, but let’s face it, we can make a fair stab at the results of this study can’t we?

In related news, the EU rules (entirely correctly) that Gibraltar is a colony of the British Empire. (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/brexit-news-latest-gibraltar-spain-british-colony-crown-travel-a8757926.html). Gibraltar, along with the North of Ireland and the notorious backstop, is of course a major reason why May’s deal didn’t get through. From the OP: ‘ And the heretofore hard-right Tory talking point of ‘why don’t you just “re-join” the UK and make our border problem disappear for us please’ is now, apparently, a reasonable question for a flagship news programme to put to the minister of a sovereign state.’ In other words, the ‘solution’ by the Tories for Ireland is to rejoin a nascent British Empire (as parroted by the state broadcaster: wasnt it refreshing when BBC radio news used to be literally prefaced by a martial tune entitled Imperial Echoes?)

@23 If you look at the ‘hardcore Brexiteers’ of the European Research Group (especially the so to speak publicly available version of its membership, the authors of the Letter to the PM of 16th Feb 2018) I think you’ll find that most (or possibly all) of these people are English. Even the ones who were born in Scotland or elsewhere tended to be educated at Oxbridge. In any case, I am willing to bet that almost all of them have a, shall we say, Empire friendly view of British history. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Research_Group)

@25
Yes and what will the UK do then? They will have no choice but to go crawling back to the EU and ask for….something. The EU will take a hit in the case of No Deal but their economies won’t disintegrate in the same way the UK’s will. So No Deal is really Remain in disguise (or at least a new relationship with the EU that will be vastly to EU’s advantage). Which is one of the many reasons No Deal is extremely unlikely to happen.

I can remember hoping, a couple of years before the World Trade Center towers came down, that the United States would be able to give up its pretensions to empire with as much grace as Britain had done. Which goes to show, I suppose, that ignorance, while not exactly blissful, can at least be comforting.

How different things look now that everything seemingly buried in 1945 has been so well and truly disinterred. I wonder about the all-American porker with his red MAGA hat, the bull-necked German with his I’m brown because Germany has gotten so colorful tee shirt, and all the other aspirant fascists around the world. They don’t seem to represent any kind of viable future, and it’s at least possible, I think, that once the return of the repressed has again had its fill of blood and chaos, we’ll find ourselves one step closer to the kind of world culture that all of us rootless cosmopolitans dream of.

I’m in my mid-seventies, so I’ll never find out, but there’s at least one consolation. No matter what happens, I’ll be able to leave. I’ve given hostages to fortune in the form of grandchildren, it’s true, but that’s as much a matter of hope as despair. For the many generations of us who’ll never see the Promised Land, Paul Celan said it as well as it can be said: “wir schaufeln ein Grab / in den Lüften / da liegt man nicht eng.“

‘My guess is the Irish question is going to get very weird over the next few years (though when hasn’t it been weird).’

A poll (it was online so caveat lector) showed that a majority of people in the North or Ireland would want a united Ireland if Brexit went ahead. (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-45391529)

There are many many many people in Ireland who would not, to put it mildly, be very happy with the idea of a hard border between the two Irelands. You think it was a coincidence that that dissident Republican bomb attack happened in the run up to the crucial Commons votes?

53% of Scots would rather stay in the EU and be independent than be forced to leave the EU. (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/scottish-independence-better-than-brexit-htt8lbwvc)

While support for Welsh independence is much lower, it still leaps up in the event of Brexit (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/welsh-independence-poll-brexit-eu-referendum-plaid-cymru-leanne-wood-a7142856.html)

@Hidari, I think this thesis that the Welsh take a different view on Brexit to the English is rather vulnerable to the facts. In 2016 53.5% of voters in England voted to Leave, whereas 52.5% in Wales did.

MisterMr part of the problem is that the elite have set up a crisis of confidence in their own pronouncements. The EU has long been touted as good for the UK, but it ended up leaving a very large percentage of people who didn’t get to share in that. So that left a bunch of people to conclude that the promises were either lies to screw them over, or at best misguided confusion about how “expert opinion” played out. Either way it was a reason to mistrust the “experts” who were either wrong or lying to them for decades.

With that in mind, it becomes easier to see how a majority of people can vote against their interests. They have decided that the experts are untrustworthy, so when they say it is “against their interests”, they aren’t to be trusted

Now the reality is that like many people who lose faith in experts, they have fallen in with frauds. Hopefully they will realize that soon. But the reason they don’t trust the experts isn’t surprising—the experts weren’t paying attention to the fact that they weren’t doing well and the experts kept saying “oh no, you’re actually doing well”.

From a political perspective it is also important to remember that politics is always about priorities. For both of the major parties figuring out how to do more globalism (for the Tories) or deeper EUism for Labour, always took precedence over figuring out how to mitigate the downside of both those things. Eventually people wised up to that fact.

The problem is that the ONLY chance they were ever given to vote on that mess was Brexit. If there had been a viable party saying “the EU is probably ok in the long run, but we won’t go for ever deeper union until we figure out how to share the wealth better”. The closest there was to that was Labour saying that they can do both, but always prioritizing the EU concerns.

A righteous gut-punch, Maria.

For a generation, young people in NI have grown up with the explicit acknowledgement that they can identify as British, Irish, both, or plainly as ‘Northern Irish.’ All of that changes when an Irish passport (or, as the DUP calls it, “an EU travel document”) has greater value than a British one. For British citizens living elsewhere, especially those on non-permanent visas with non-British spouses, it raises the question of whether one can ever go back. It is a theft of the future primarily by those who who aren’t going to be around in 20 years: the ‘Airfix generation’ who think they ‘survived the war’ because they remember the end of sugar rationing as children. And of course, for EU citizens in the UK, it is worse than all that.

That hurt to read, and rightly so. Thanks for writing it.

Re Nick S @ 36
Since I turn 80 next week, I have a small claim to having survived the War. Besides, doesn’t the oldest he/she that is in Britain have a right to live as much as the youngest he/she. Ageism in defence of liberty is no virtue.

@Sebastian H 34

What you say is true, but IMHO is just a part of the story. The point is that to mitigate the effects of globalization on one group you have to take from the other, for example through increased or more progressive taxation, and this by its nature is conflictual.
On the other hand if you blame it all on some external scapegoat, such as the EU or foreigners, you can propose a non conflictual, have your cake and eat it solution, even though that solution is illusory.

I will add that IMHO the effects of globalization are actually the effects of deregulation of the labor market and similar policies in internal policies, globalization by itself didn’t create these problems but justified the internal policies.

@41 you may be right at the individual level (who knows?) but the inference you drew is not what the article linked stated. It states: ‘there appeared to be a strong Remain vote in areas with a high proportion of Welsh speakers.’ This may be right or wrong or whatever I don’t know, but that”s what it says.

On a related theme:

‘AS the Doomsday Clock this week edged another stroke towards midnight, time is moving swiftly backwards in England, seeking a point in the 19th century. The prospect of a No Deal retreat from the EU has reduced the Leave offering to exhortations of empire. Unable cogently to respond to projections of economic apocalypse persistent Brexiters are reduced to cries of: “This Is England” and “We’ve always been great when we’ve stood alone”. Even the pretence that Scotland is part of the grand delusion has been dropped. England has become a tabloid tantrum ever-vigilant for signs of treachery and they have elected the usual witch-finders and torch-bearers….

in… this period )the 18th and 19th and early 20th centuries) Britain also fought hundreds of smaller wars and military skirmishes which were something less that ‘great’ and had inglorious outcomes. These too were all about maintaining power: the power and influence of the British Empire. Many of them involved the savage suppression of indigenous peoples. The distorted chronicles of British history glibly describe some of the atrocities. These, though, are often sanctified as necessarily brutal to serve the higher purpose of extending British influence and bequeathing the gifts of civilisation and Christianity upon natives who would come to be grateful for them….

and when even ravenous England had had its fill of a nation’s bounty their retreat from these stolen territories was often marked by the callous indifference to human suffering that had characterised its occupation of them. Britain’s betrayal of the Arabs after the 1916 Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire in turn led to the Iraq Uprising of 1920 and bombing raids against civilians by the RAF. Instability in that region has continued to this day. The same cold-blooded indifference was evident in Ireland after 1916 and the gerrymandered construction of the artificial province of Northern Ireland. That led to 75 years of sectarian strife before a peace of sorts was achieved and now threatened once more by Brexit’s new Little Englanders….

In more recent times the brutality of the police in suppressing the Miners’ Strike in 1984 and 1985 has yet to be investigated. No other country in the developed world, be they democracy or tyranny, has managed to suppress rebellion so brutally efficiently and so successfully for so long than Britain. When you have ancient privileges and riches to protect you’ll go to extreme lengths to do so….

reen MSP Ross Greer gloriously trolled the UK media glove-puppets to whom the fictions of Empire have been entrusted. Mr Greer, deploying rather vivid imagery dismissed Sir Winston Churchill, the great champion of the British Empire, as an unreconstructed racist who had the blood of millions on his hands. There is little doubt that Churchill was a disreputable old scoundrel whose few moments of greatness coincided with Britain’s greatest need. This shouldn’t blind us to his flaws and if we are condemning ideas of racial superiority we need to acknowledge that the British Empire was entirely constructed around such attitudes and endured because of them. To focus purely on its greatest defender carries the risk of shifting attention from its fundamental and historic wickedness…

This week we learned that thousands of British soldiers are gathering to maintain order in the face of a disorderly EU exit. ‘

How ironic if the British imperial fantasy ends as it began and continued throughout, with the British army shooting innocent civilians (in the North of Ireland they rarely stopped doing this), and how ironic if these are British civilians. Rees-Mogg and the rest will be delighted as this is what they always wanted, but I wonder how the rest will feel.

https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/17403994.kevin-mckenna-the-brutality-of-the-british-empire-lives-on-in-the-dark-heart-of-the-brexiters/

Virtue advances, step by step: The European Parliament recognizes Guaido.
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20190125IPR24303/venezuela-parliament-recognises-guaido-urges-eu-to-follow-suit

Everyone is entitled to a defence. Everyone watched and enjoyed, half the viewers were deploring Alf— while the other half were adoring the little Britler. Not much changed then.

Maria, beautifully written as always, and utterly heartbreaking.

Totally absorbed in the surreal state of my own country, I hadn’t known this was happening: And the heretofore hard-right Tory talking point of ‘why don’t you just “re-join” the UK and make our border problem disappear for us please’ is now, apparently, a reasonable question for a flagship news programme to put to the minister of a sovereign state. It isn’t polite, or perhaps even possible, to express how angry this makes me, as an Irish person who lives in the UK.

Ironic that when I think of where I’d go if things got too bad to cope with over here, Ireland is at or near the top of my list. Ironic also that there was a time when I might have married an Irish woman, if only marriage had been possible in those days, and yet that would have been a disaster of another sort, so it’s probably just as well it turned out the way it did.

Anger not possible to put into words is a familiar feeling these days. I’m trying to stay engaged and centered, but the temptation to go hide in the woods is pretty strong.

Following up on my earlier comment:
On the one hand, it’s historical fact that Welsh people, Scottish people, and Irish people were victims of English imperialism; on the other hand, it’s historical fact that Welsh people, Scottish people, and Irish people were enthusiastic participants in British/UK imperialism.
It’s practically certain now that there’s a relationship between enthusiasm/nostalgia for the British/UK imperial past and negative feelings towards the EU (or at least towards UK-EU ties); but there’s no reason to suppose that Welsh people, Scottish people, and Northern Irish people are immune to either of those things.

None of which touches on the main point here, but I’ve got nothing of value to contribute to that discussion except that I’m grateful to Maria and commenters for sharing their feelings

When arguing with Northern Irish enthusiasts, I have taken to playing the England First card: ‘ We send more to Northern Ireland each year than we do to the EU—11 billion quid, in fact! We could give that to our NHS instead! England is coming out of the EU, next we need to get out of the UK! If the Northern Irish wish to stay–let them pay! England First!

Shock, denial, and dismay ensue–then they rapidly change the subject. Maybe this is the way for the left to go? If the logic of lexit is national independence from a centralising entity, why not push that further?

@53 Interesting idea. It’s interesting the way that Brexit is shaking everything up. As I’ve said, it’s highly unlikely, but possible, that this whole mess might end up in producing a united Ireland, an independent Scotland, and the ‘loss’ of Gibraltar to Spain. Perhaps even Wales might get a fairer treatment if the remaining England is forced to adopt a more federal structure.

Presumably the suddenly very lonely new state of England will be forced to go back and beg to rejoin the EU with its tails between its legs.

As someone from Northen Ireland/the North of Ireland, I would say that JD is certainly right that some people from Northern Ireland view the Britain’s imperial past more fondly than others, although not a majority, and possibly not even a majority of unionists either. One of the many features of Brexit that cause me to grind my teeth is having to watch the DUP present themselves as the voice of Northern Ireland despite having failed to persuade a majority of voters here to get on board with Brexit (to say nothing of their long standing resistance to British law on abortion rights and equal marriage being extended to NI, or having to put up being lectured by Arlene Foster, of all people, about the narrowness of nationalism, in contrast to unionism…).

In the run up to the vote I put it to a leading Leave campaigner here that their determination not be honest with the voters about the trade-offs involved was wildly irresponsible. He replied that they were being inundated with offers of support from the South and that Ireland would ultimately leave the EU and throw its lot in with the UK. At the time I assumed he was merely trying to get a rise out of me, but now I’m not so sure. Imperial nostalgia does indeed seem to drive so much of the wishful thinking that has characterised the romance of Brexit.

Like many middle of the road nationalist (Irish nationalist, not philosophical nationalist) types, I was happy to see any question of the unity being put on the long finger while we tried to make this place work more effectively for the people who live here. The Brexit debacle has led me to think again – the reality of our situation is that everything has been thrown up in the air by a group of people for whom we are at best an afterthought (Karen Bradley is a relatively benign example of this) and at worst an expensive, uppity, irritation. Like Maria then, I want to leave, although in my case I am already at home. Even if Brexit is somehow averted (which I think is highly unlikely) I think that a growing number of people here will think that leaving the UK sooner rather than later would be for the best. At least this option is now on the horizon for us (some of us), as it may also be for Scotland, but I can only imagine how all of this must feel for those millions of English voters who didn’t fall for any of this nonsense and who have been almost entirely written out of the Brexit drama by both main parties in Westminster. How must it feel to have to endure people like John Trickett talking about the need to deliver Brexit so that ‘millions of ordinary people’ don’t lose faith in democracy, when million of ordinary people are already losing faith, if not in democracy, certainly in the willingness of their political representatives to act in the interests of their country. Like Maria, I am both angry and sad at how all of this is turning out, for everyone involved.

Harry @45, Wondering if you caught Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast on satire (and its lack of political effect). All In the Family comes up as well as some Brit examples.

I might be misremembering, but as I recall part of the GFA is that Northern Ireland has the right to a referrendum on rejoing the Republic. Demographic changes in Northern Ireland and the gradual of the Unionist project among protestants means that if such a vote were to happen today it would be pretty close. Obviously if you a hard border and the chaos that would result from a hard Brexit could quite easily result in a reunified Ireland.

@ Hidari – yes of course.

Here’s an article summarising Varadkar’s position as “There have been fears that checkpoints could return to the Irish border in the event of a hard Brexit and that this could again lead to violence.” This has gone down like a lead balloon. The garda commissioner is at it too

Obviously no one is going to openly state that unless the UK agrees to Irish demands there will be bombings in the UK, but the narrative is clear – unless the UK agrees the EU proposal then they will be forced to erect a hard border which will reignite the terrorism campaign. The last time this happened, whilst the majority of terrorism was in NI, there was a significant amount in the UK including the murder of several politicians.

@ Cian – 64 “I might be misremembering, but as I recall part of the GFA is that Northern Ireland has the right to a referrendum on rejoing the Republic.”

The GFA isn’t that specific but clause ii of the Constitution section says The Participants … recognise that it is for the people of the island of Ireland alone … to exercise their right of self-determination on the basis of consent, freely and concurrently given, North and South, to bring about a united Ireland, if that is their wish, accepting that this right must be achieved and exercised with and subject to the agreement and consent of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland;

What it also says in section i is ” recognise the legitimacy of whatever choice is freely exercised by a majority of the people of Northern Ireland with regard to its status, whether they prefer to continue to support the Union with Great Britain or a sovereign united Ireland;” which I think could be interpreted as saying that NI cannot be removed from the EU without a majority of people of NI voting for it. I’m not sure why those against Brexit aren’t arguing this point.

As you might guess from my first 2 names, I am British, and of Polish extraction (my Mother was Polish). She went through all the same racist shit in the 1950s, after coming to England as a refugee in 1947, speaking no English because she had been brought up in a forced labour camp. (She and my Grandmother both survived that experience). She became a secondary-school teacher, to A-level, specialist subject English.
I am sick of the now really blatant racism that is a frequent reality in England: a friend of ours (Dutch, in her 50s) was attacked in the street in our town (Lancaster) for speaking Dutch on her mobile phone. In “Lancaster for Europe”, I and others have spent all the time since the referendung talking to people about the impact of Brexit, and being told I was a traitor and once, memorably, a member of the Hitler Youth! (I was 55 at the time). I am moving to Frankfurt, Germany, on the 19th of March, with my wife. We both speak German, and we will register as residents and apply for long-term residency while we still can, before the 29th of March. We will pay taxes to the german government (as registered freelance translators) instead of the UK. And if that doesn’t work out. we will go and live in Malaysia, where we have relatives and contacts. ABB – not just an engineering company – also “Anything But Britain”.
Good luck, everyone!

Dipper, I know you won’t because you never do, but I think you should put some thought into Duncan Roman Bell’s comment, and ask yourself what you have done to your own country. Are you proud of this?

Dipper@61:
This question is a classic piece of English understatement. The blunt way of putting it is that if you put British sovereignty on the table we will put your sovereignty on the table.
“Sovereignty” is not a binary value – there are degrees of sovereignty. Saying that “we have the same amount of sovereignty and I don’t like it so I want to increase my sovereignty” is not equivalent to “we have the same amount of sovereignty and I don’t like it so I want to increase my sovereignty while simultaneously making your sovereignty subordinate to my sovereignty”.

It also ignores that the UK has progressively eliminated their leverage to the point where they’re certainly not capable of making credible demands – which makes claims that other nations should volunteer to be annexed more belligerent than warning about possible outcomes of rebuilding a militarized border that was demilitarized in accordance to the mutual cooperation underpinning the GFA. That sort of statement is completely tonedeaf, and reactions to it such as yours here do nothing to dispel the idea that Brexiters long for a return to the halcyon days of Empire.

Late last year I wrote a blog post about the impact of social changes in Ireland on attitudes to union. I remember that 20 years ago people would often dismiss the idea of reunification because Ireland was seen as a religiously fanatical backwater. Since then Ireland has changed a lot and the UK hasn’t, to the point where I suspect it would be quite easy for the Irish to convince a majority of Northern Irish people to rejoin them. Once Brexit gets underway and the UK becomes an even more backward and moribund basket case, I suspect the final social barriers to reunification will disappear for all but the most hardcore nationalists. I suspect Brexit will speed the process by which the UK loses NI.

Before Brexit I would guess it would not have been easy for Scotland to leave the UK and immediately join the EU (I think I even remember something about this during the independence referendum). I suspect the EU will be circumspect about allowing newly-independent countries to join the EU because that will basically mean that the EU is encouraging independence movements in European nations. There is no economic downside to independence for Catalonia if they can just walk into the EU, and I would guess that there is some pressure from Spain for the EU not to allow that.

Of course, once the UK leaves the EU it is no longer able to exert any such pressure … so I wonder how quickly Scotland and NI will leave the UK, and what the Tories will be willing to do to keep them.

Dipper

Unlike some of the other commenters here, I feel that your comment suggests a point that merits serious discussion. If a national leader refers publicly to the possibility of some people resorting to violence, does it increase the risk that that those people will actually resort to violence? On consideration, it seems to me that the answer to this question is that sometimes it will and sometimes it won’t, and that it’s definitely something a national leader should reflect on. There probably are situations where public discussion of the possibility of resort to violence will increase the risk of that resort to violence, and in those situations it would be ill-advised for a national leader to discuss the subject publicly unless there was an extremely strong countervailing consideration. In some situations it might be worse than just ill-advised, it might be reckless dangerous folly. However, it wouldn’t always be so, and certainly it wouldn’t be justified to lay down an absolute rule, or even a general rule, that national leaders should not refer to the possibility of violence.

Moving from the general to the particular, I don’t know enough about the situation in Ireland to know whether Leo Varadkar’s discussion of the possibility of a return to violence by Northern Ireland paramilitaries was a reasonable and justifiable thing for him to do. I’m not sure that it will increase the risk of exactly the return to violence he was expressing concern about, but it is a possibility, and if so it was a bad decison on his part: maybe an extremely bad decision. I have to qualify that, though, by saying that I expect Leo Varadkar, though still fallible, has more knowledge and understanding of the situation than I do. I would like to think he would be reasonably careful about what he says. Still, I don’t know for sure that he is. I’m sure we can all think of examples of utterances and other actions by national leaders which have been reckless, dangerous, and foolish.

Having covered all that: none of the above could ever justify the distortion of describing Leo Varadkar’s utterances as threats.

Maria – no insult was intended and I apologise if any was taken.

@ Jim Buck- the GFA, agreed when it was assumed the UK was going to be in the EU for ever, implicitly rejects the notion of the UK having a strategic stake in NI and explicitly states that if a majority of people in NI so wish then NI may unite with RoI. Brexit doesn’t change that position, so if that majority arises from peoples perception of Brexit then I so no reason why that would be a problem.

Thank you Maria for your insightful, and deeply moving, story of how Brexit has affected you. As a UK passport holder of Irish, Maltese, Alsatian and English heritage I left some years ago. Any lingering regrets that I might have harboured have been thoroughly dispelled by the unpleasant and slanderous statements offered by the denizens of the swamp known, somewhat erroneously, as the European Research Group.

implicitly rejects the notion of the UK having a strategic stake in NI

What, you thought that was the GFA substance? that’s boilerplate self-determination guff, hasn’t been seriously disputed since the 50s anywhere.

The actual substance of the GFA is the legitimation of both “irish” and “british” identities: people in NI are supposed to be entitled to “irish” or “british” lives, at their preference, reducing the sovereignty issue to a minor bureaucratic technicality. Brexit impacts this rather dramatically, for reasons you should have understood a year and a half ago.

Dipper: it’s been two years. This has been talked about for eighteen months. There’s two months to go: you need to ask yourself, “why do I not understand the problem yet”.

I haven’t really seen much coverage of how Brexit has affected Northern Irish perspectives of the UK. I know that there’s been a surge in applications for Irish passports – but has it made people there feel more favourably about reunification?

Dipper –

(a) ‘an inappropriate political intervention’. The logic of your position is that the Chief Constable is encouraging terrorism. Do you think he should be sacked?
And the joint statement by Major and Blair before the referendum, when they said that leaving the EU would undermine the peace process? Also irresponsible?

(b) To call something a civil war in no way implies anything about legitimacy. There are acts of terrorism in most civil wars – the Spanish, the Russian, the Finnish, even the English/British one.

(c) In that debate, Durkan said that ‘the implications of the UK leaving the EU would be pretty fundamental, not just for my constituency but for the political institutions in Northern Ireland. The common experience of EU membership provided the very context in which there were changed British and Irish relations, which in turn provided the context for the peace process… Fundamental damage and change may be done when serious questions are raised about our commitment to human rights and to our membership of the EU’.

Maybe short, but it hardy minimizes the issue. And if it was not followed up in the debate, that is a symptom of precisely the problem we are talking about.