This Brexit government’s ignorance is steering us towards disaster
There is so much this government doesn’t know. But two particular areas of ignorance exploded into view this week, allowing us to take a long, hard look at the cost they are inflicting on the country. Both are central to the Brexit project that remains this government’s defining mission – but only one of them is surprising.
Start with the unexpected ignorance, which is of the US and US politics. It’s a surprise, because if there’s one thing that unites the British political class it’s an interest in – even an obsessive fixation on – the politics of the United States. (And yes, I plead guilty.) If you were to hold a nerds’ convention on The West Wing or House of Cards, you’d host it in SW1. The Westminster villager who struggles to identify a single German politician besides Angela Merkel will speak with ease about the latest polling from Maine’s second congressional district or the precise composition of the Wisconsin supreme court.
That’s doubly true of a certain kind of Brexiter, the type who bangs on about “the Anglosphere”. These are folk who couldn’t wait to be shot of the continentals and embrace our true cousins across the Atlantic.
Such a notion may defy the laws of geography – nations trade most with their nearest neighbours – but it turned into policy, as Conservative ministers promised that we’d make up for the lost advantages of the European single market by reaching a sparkly new trade deal with the US. When Boris Johnson campaigned for the Tory leadership last year, his team briefed that he would have an agreement with the US done and dusted within months.
That delusion was shattered once more this week, courtesy of a tweet from the Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden. “We can’t allow the Good Friday agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland to become a casualty of Brexit,” he wrote. “Any trade deal between the US and UK must be contingent upon respect for the agreement and preventing the return of a hard border. Period.”
A Tory chorus turned on Biden – accusing him, somewhat audaciously, of ignorance, of wading into an area he did not understand. In so doing, his accusers revealed rather less about Biden’s deficiencies than their own.
Because it would have taken only the lightest Googling to see that Biden, a former chair of the Senate foreign relations committee, has had a decades-long interest in Ireland, anchored in the pride he takes in his own Irish ancestry. His speeches are peppered with the words of Irish poets; last month, he closed out his acceptance address at the Democratic convention by quoting Seamus Heaney. As a teenager, he worked on his stutter by reciting Yeats.
Perhaps the Brexiters can be forgiven for not knowing more about Biden. But their ignorance runs deeper. All that fantasy talk of a rapid trade deal signed with a pro-Brexit Donald Trump failed to appreciate that the US does trade deals very slowly: chances are, even a re-elected Trump would not be in the Oval Office by the time an accord was ready for signature. More importantly, Trump’s approval was never going to be enough: trade agreements have to be ratified by both houses of the US Congress.
The Brits tend to prioritise the White House or the intelligence agencies. There, on Capitol Hill, the real special relationship is not, as Tory nostalgists imagine, between the US and Britain, but between the US and Ireland. It might be about roots, as it partly is for Biden. It might be about pleasing Irish-American voters, as perhaps it is for House speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco. It might be about the extremely effective Irish lobby, which has cultivated links in Congress for decades. (The British tend to prioritise the White House and the intelligence agencies.)
Put simply, the Brexiters may know their Frank Underwoods from their Jed Bartlets, but they have long failed to understand that no US-UK trade deal is ever going to happen unless the Irish dimension is resolved to Dublin’s satisfaction.
Which brings us to the second ignorance, one that is both less surprising and far less forgivable. I refer to a British Tory casualness, lack of interest in and sheer boredom with the matter of Northern Ireland. Recall Johnson’s comparison of the border between Ireland north and south to the congestion-charge boundary that divides the London boroughs of Westminster and Camden. Recall, too, his treatment of the Democratic Unionist party, promising no border down the Irish Sea, then signing a withdrawal agreement that entails exactly that – only now to propose a bill that would break the very treaty he had signed.
Underneath is the deepest ignorance of all: the wilful refusal to see the conundrum that Brexit poses. Put simply, if the UK leaves the single market and the customs union, there has to be a meaningful border (and border checks) between the UK and the EU. That border either divides the island of Ireland, reinflaming the conflict healed by the Good Friday agreement; or it falls in the Irish Sea, separating Northern Ireland from Great Britain and thereby splitting the United Kingdom. “Where do you put the border,” asks Jonathan Powell, who as Tony Blair’s chief of staff worked for a decade on peace in Northern Ireland. “It is actually insoluble. There isn’t a solution.”
This was the ignorance at the very heart of Brexit: the failure to realise that ending the Troubles was possible only because Ireland and the UK were in the same supranational entity – thereby blurring the border between north and south, and allowing those in the north to identify as British or Irish or both. The Good Friday agreement was built on that fundamental, European foundation. But this key point was always lost on Johnson and the Brexiters. “Most of them couldn’t care less,” says Powell.
Ignorant of the land across the ocean, ignorant of the land across the sea, this government bent on Brexit is crashing us into rocks it cannot even see.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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