A foreign country...
Yesterday’s article by the Foreign Secretary in the Sunday Telegraph was a hoot. She, or her speech writers, could only think of three problems that the NIP was causing the good people of Northern Ireland.
One doesn’t even happen, one was pet passports and one was a slight problem with kosher food; which at least has the benefit of avoiding the provinces’ sectarian divide.
None of them are exactly casus belli.
But these weak as onion water outrages still led the Foreign Secretary to announce that ALL checks on goods staying in NI need to end and the ECJ must not have any say in the matter or else ART. 16.
Same old threats from the same old people, on the same old problems that they created and agreed to.
Liz Truss will be having talks with the EU latter this week but first is speaking to the DUP and Sinn Fein. One will tell her the whole NIP has to go, one that a majority voted remain and NI benefits from being in the Single Market.
There is no middle ground between them and not much between the EU and UK.
This is what the UK has been reduced to; a Foreign Secretary haggling with minority parties in a small part of the country in a desperate attempt to reverse a legally binding deal she and her party boasted of only a few months ago.
It will all come down to whether the Westminster government wants the distraction and damage of a dispute with the EU or not.
The interests of NI don’t even appear on the government’s radar. Let alone; patriotism, national self interest, pragmatism, realism, honesty, integrity or even the rule of law.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.