THE latest Foreign Office betrayal of the nation state it purports to serve came with James Cleverly’s complete cave-in to EU demands for unfettered access to confidential data about trade flows into Northern Ireland from the UK, so as to enable the EU to control trading – an unprecedented usurpation of power within a unified state. This was not stipulated in the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) itself: it is a gift by our subversive Foreign Office, and with absolutely nothing gained in return.
President Biden continues to bark at the UK to accede to every EU demand; the FCO is showing obedience. Biden reminds me of Father Jack in the Father Ted TV series, an elderly priest who is largely comatose but occasionally waking up to shout ‘Drink! drink!’ although in Biden’s case it would be ‘Sinn Fein! Sinn Fein!’ Brussels, Washington and now London are together tightening the economic tourniquet around the British province, enforcing an EU economic identity on it, along with EU controls. The Good Friday Agreement lies in ruins, directly caused by the EU in their quest to make Brexit fail and to punish the UK. Now Whitehall is joining this pressure to make Brexit fail, along with the grotesque junta of remainers who have seized power in Westminster. For the full horror of Cleverly’s surrender, see Kate Hoey’s exposé.
The NIP is arguably worse for the UK than the commentariat has realised, giving the EU a lever to pull on Britain if it feels that the trade controls are being broken, see here. Cleverly should have at least demanded in return a digital trade border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, which is entirely possible, but he is in effect working as an EU official and accepting EU terms. DEFRA, another deeply remainer department of state, is accepting Irish beef imports despite the fact that the cattle are allowed to be fed ground-up carcasses, illegal in the UK. DEFRA is fighting hard to keep out far healthier and cheaper Australian beef, reared in the open air on grass. Such is the determination of Whitehall to bond with the EU and push away any other nations with whom we have agreements. We should remember the undermining of Lord Frost’s robust negotiating stance over the NIP by civil servants, forcing his resignation. He was not defended by PM Johnson.
Sherelle Jacobs’s column in the Telegraph tells us that Brexit is dead, killed by Tory incompetence and vilified in every corner of the media. It is probably unsalvageable, she says. The polls are showing diminishing support for it, and the 30 Tory MPs who managed to stave off Theresa May’s total capitulation are apparently losing heart, notably Steve Baker who is now a minister and is apologising to the EU for his resistance to their takeover aggression – he too is joining the Kim Philby line of foreign policy. Jacobs may be right, but if so it is not just a matter of Tory incompetence but of deliberate policy to hamper, suborn and sabotage a clean and beneficial Brexit at every turn and in every department of state, all remainer to the core and planning to rejoin in a decade.
British membership of the EU was supposed to be permanent and inescapable in 1973. Our bureaucracy fully embraced a loyalty to Brussels and became joined at the hip. They no longer accepted British sovereignty nor Parliamentary rule: Parliament became a kind of glove puppet of Brussels which simply funnelled power from Westminster under cover of MPs’ flagging through any and every new regulation and law. This is what the NIP restores: EU power over trade internal to the UK, with NI in the single market for all regulation. I make no apology for quoting the text of a Foreign Office mandarin in 1972, setting out this slowly growing transfer of power away from Parliament and to Brussels, para 26 of FCO 30 1048 (I note this text is no longer available online):
‘26. To play an effective part in the Community British members of the Commission and their staffs and British officials as negotiators will necessarily assume more political roles than is traditional in the UK. The Community, if we are to benefit to the full, will develop wider powers and co-ordinate and manage policy over wider areas of public business. To control and supervise this process it will be necessary to strengthen the democratic organisation of the Community with consequent decline of the primacy and prestige of the national Parliaments. The task will not be to arrest this process, since to do so would be to put considerations of formal sovereignty before effective influence and power, but to adapt institutions and policies both in the UK and in Brussels to meet and reduce the real and substantial public anxieties over national identity and alienation from government, fear of change and loss of control over their fate which are aroused by talk of “loss of sovereignty”.’
This project is back with a vengeance. I hear no Tory MP voicing outrage at this rejection of the decisive Brexit referendum vote, confirmed by the astonishingly large confirmatory vote for PM Johnson in his election victory. The closet Tory remainer MPs, working with the civil servants and the BBC and MSM, have managed to turn back democracy. The one major statement that Nigel Farage made that was wrong on all this was ‘It’s over, it’s over’, on hearing the referendum result: he did not realise the power and depth of autocratic, globalist remainerdom in the bizarrely named ‘Conservative Party’. Dominic Cummings did realise that Whitehall would never allow Brexit to be implemented, but he was displaced by Carrie, and she decided otherwise. The situation now is that a deeply remainer Cabinet is stealthily undoing Brexit, a Cabinet looking more like a junta imposed not the generals but by the ‘the markets’ and the Bank of England.
David Card’s excellent TCW exposé of the MoD reversing the Johnson administration’s rejection of the UK joining PESCO is another clear piece of evidence that Brexit is being steadily and deeply replaced by a powerful rejoiner Cabinet. We hear of the bonfire of EU regulations, but again of this being stopped – by our real rulers in Whitehall for whom Sunak is simply another patsy. And surely the real reason why this government is so keen on our economic stagnation, inexplicable otherwise, is to help ‘make Brexit fail’. That is my hypothesis: keeping growth down for a few years and taxing companies will stop any hint of a Brexit benefit. For a Treasury official, that is a price well worth paying.
The Conservative Party is pulling off yet another massive betrayal: it has sold out Northern Ireland despite solemn pledges. Lord Frost’s work has been completely undone. How any decent person could possibly vote for this political party baffles me; it excels only in deceit and can never be trusted. Brexit can only be saved by a revival of the Brexit Party or Reform, with Farage telling the truth about this deepening and widening sell-out, as well as Net Zero and the threat to freedom of speech. As things stand, the Tories have sold us out.