UK Govt’s Reaction to Trumpism’s Demise?
We have enough data points now to know.
The UK foreign secretary told the BBC on Sunday that the UK government has no intention of erecting “border infrastructure” on the border between the EU and the UK.
This is a thinly veiled threat to return to the fruitless two-year search for what the UK govt called “alternative arrangements” to a border on the island of Ireland.
Raab also blamed the EU for threatening to erect a border.
Whereas, it is the English govt, by deciding to leave the EU, itself which has opted to erect a border between the UK and the EU.
Meanwhile, last evening, the English govt was defeated in the UK House of Lords in its bonkers attempt to renege on the treaty with the EU that it just signed and won an election on the back of.
The govt’s legal grounds for doing so are legally illiterate.
Here I explain why, from the perspective of UK constitutional law:
The English govt is advancing a further argument when it says it’s a breach of a constitutional convention for the Lords to defeat the Govt on a manifesto commitment.
Yet, the draft treaty with the front-stopped Northern Ireland Backstop was the ISSUE the government went to the country over and it won a mandate to ratify that treaty from the electorate.
It didn’t win a mandate to renege on the treaty!
The UK govt’s response to the defeat of Trumpism?
In the “Cult of Heroic Failure” Fintan O’Toole argued convincingly that, bizarrely, Brexiteers had adopted the clothes of Irish nationalist leaders in the 1916 rising against British Imperial Rule.
Arch English nationalist Brexiteer Owen Paterson, put himself in the shoes of an anti-British pro-European leader, apparently without irony, even quoting Michael Collins in the House of Commons!
Ireland kept the light of civilization alive during the first millennium, before reseeding the learning it preserved across the whole continent during Charlemagne’s time.
The English govt has clearly decided to keep the light of Trumpism alive.
Good luck with that.
