You may not feel it, but we here in Northern Ireland are currently living in the calm before the storm. One day, a few years from now, when there is a right wing British Prime Minister in place and Labour are sulking on the opposition benches, we will likely see a wholesale attack on the Good Friday Agreement by people who don’t live here and who don’t care for here and yet who have ultimate authority over us as they try reorder our lives to suit their own preferences.
I think of it as the Morning Coffee Test. There are individuals who want to wake up in the morning, look out across the misty dawn and take a big draught of their morning coffee and revel in the knowledge that all is right in their world. All being right in their world may means others they don’t know and lands they will never visit maybe facing chaos and upheaval, but so long as their ideological preference prevails they genuinely couldn’t care less. That at the end of the day is their greatest aspiration. When the British right fulfilled their wildest dreams and managed to convince a majority of their countrymen that Brexit would solve every single problem they were cock-a-hoop!
And yet, still things rankle. Right now, for the British right, there are aspects that are extremely important for Northern Ireland that don’t conform to their ideology. We disturb their peace of mind and the messy complexity of our lived reality impedes the realisation of their utopian vision. And they dream of fixing that, consequences for us be damned.
We saw a sign of this a few days ago when Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage delivered a speech in which he laid out the plan under which a future government he leads would tackle the small boats crisis.
His answer is mass deportations, with the goal of removing six-hundred-thousand people from the UK over the duration of his government, forbidding anyone who arrives in the UK illegally from claiming asylum and even offering to pay foreign governments to take people back.
“Key to the plan is the passage of a new law called the Illegal Migration (Mass Deportation) Bill.
Reform UK said the bill would create a legal duty for the home secretary to remove illegal migrants, and ban anyone who had been deported from re-entering the UK for life.
The bill would also “disapply” international treaties like the Refugee Convention, a 1951 treaty that prevents signatory countries like the UK from returning refugees to countries where they face serious threats to their life or freedom.
To make removals easier, Reform is promising to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), another treaty designed to protect human rights and political freedoms.”
Every state in Europe bar Russia and Belarus is a member of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR). Farage is determined that the UK joins such lofty company and he is not alone, with Tory leader Kemi Badenoch having launched a review in early June to see if the Conservatives should advocate for withdrawal from several international treaties including the ECHR. I would say the report’s recommendations are a foregone conclusion but perhaps I will be surprised.
Of course the European Convention on Human Rights is entrenched into the Good Friday Agreement which underpins our current settlement, and that inconvenient fact has been raised time and again each time an English right-winger advocates leaving the convention and few have seriously attempted to engage with the issue.
Farage was asked the same question in fact and gave a meandering response.
“When asked if he was concerned that leaving the ECHR could jeopardise the Good Friday Agreement, Farage replied: “Yeah I mean look, Blair of course wrote the ECHR into everything.
“He wrote it into everything to try and embed it deeply in British law.
“Can we renegotiate the Good Friday Agreement to get the ECHR out of it? Yes.
“Is that something that can happen very, very quickly? No, it will take longer. It will take longer.
“So unfortunately, and for a variety of reasons – previous governments have placed Northern Ireland, I’m afraid, in a different position to the rest of the United Kingdom, something that we vigorously opposed – it will take a little bit longer with Northern Ireland.”
It’s not hard to see why the response was as vague as it was. Farage, like other advocates of ECHR withdrawal, recognise that Northern Ireland and the Good Friday Agreement are going to cause a problem should they ever be in a position to attempt to leave the ECHR and probably figure they’ll cross that bridge when they come to it.
Pressed again on our inconvenient reality, he was a bit more frank. As this article in ‘The Belfast Telegraph’ makes clear, Farage is determined to avoid the messy complexities of Northern Irish politics by simply de-prioritising them…
“Northern Ireland will “not be at the forefront” of actions by a Reform UK government to deal with immigration, Nigel Farage has said…
“Speaking in Broxburn, West Lothian on Wednesday, the Reform leader conceded that the Northern Ireland situation is “deeply complex”…
“He added: “And I did say yesterday very, very clearly, we would not be starting with Northern Ireland.
“That is something, as history shows us, anything to do with Northern Irish or Irish politics often takes years and years to solve, so that will not be at the forefront of what we do.”
Admittedly, breaking the Good Friday Agreement and then seeing if it can be put back together afterwards maybe something Farage will repent of at should he proceed with this approach, but that is a problem for future him.
And whilst you might feel you would be more comfortable if someone had undertaken a modicum of planning for leaving the ECHR whilst considering it’s impact on Northern Ireland, I am sorry to inform you that some Conservatives from the last government have done just that. Former Conservative Home Secretary Suella Braverman recently produced a report where she outlines her proposed path for leaving the ECHR, one in which she tackled the thorny issue of the Good Friday Agreement and discovers that what everyone else presumes to be nightmarishly difficult due to the nexus of history, politics and centuries of bloodletting is actually quite easy. As she says in her article on Conservative Home promoting the work…
“Perhaps the most persistent red herring is the Belfast Agreement argument. We are told, again and again, that to withdraw from the ECHR would breach the settlement, risking the fragile peace.
This is legal mythmaking: the Agreement refers to the Convention, yes – but it does not bind the UK to remain a signatory forever. The Northern Ireland Protocol was a more explicit breach of that Agreement’s spirit (as one of its architects, the late Lord Trimble argued-) and yet life carried on. Politics, after all, is the art of the possible.
So we have proposed four guiding principles for exit: legal uniformity across the UK; democratic accountability of human rights law; sincere consultation with Northern Irish communities; and a recommitment to peace through fairness, not foreign arbitration. With the invocation of Article 58 of the Convention, we would enter a six-month transition phase.
During this time, the government can, and should, engage with Dublin and Belfast on pragmatic adaptations to the 1998 settlement. If consensus cannot be reached, Parliament remains supreme. That’s not recklessness, it’s responsibility.”
The emphasis in the quoted segment is mine, but the gist is pretty clear. Trigger the withdrawal and pressurise both Dublin and non-Unionists in Northern Ireland to accept a revision to the Good Friday Agreement or Westminster will impose a solution.
Her report attempts to argue that the Agreement can be modified and remove the ECHR and cites previous modifications such as the St.Andrew’s Agreement, the Hillsborough Castle Agreement, the Stormont House Agreement, the Fresh Start Agreement and the New Decade, New Approach agreement to show why it is feasible. The logical flaw in her argument should of course be apparent from the repeated use of the word agreement, these changes were the results of behind the scenes negotiations involving all stakeholders from all communities and both governments. Attempting to modify an agreement of such sensitivity unilaterally has never been contemplated in the nearly thirty years of its existence. Braverman believes that the ECHR can be replaced, without much issue, with a British based alternative. She neglects the fact that most nationalists have very little faith in British justice systems for historical reasons, which is precisely the reason that references to the ECHR within the settlement underpinning our devolved form of government are so important to them. In other words, this is going to trigger a political shockwave in the north when it comes and anyone arguing to the contrary is being willfully blind, Braverman likely knows full well the consequences for Northern Ireland but I would suggest she, like Farage, simply values getting rid of the ECHR more. She is thus incentivised to downplay the consequences for us to achieve her own personal goal, and probably figures that political disruption in Northern Ireland will be someone else’s problem at that stage.
We also have to bear in mind the likely political climate in which this withdrawal will be taking place IF it is attempted. We will either have a Conservative government, a Conservative-Reform coalition or a Reform led government. In other words, almost certainly a form of hard right government. We have to expect a reversion to an antagonistic relationship with the European Union and that the ECHR will not be on the chopping block alone, they will likely take aim at the Windsor Framework itself. When the Right comes back to power in England, they will bring chaos and disruption for Northern Ireland with them as they attempt to reorder the United Kingdom to their liking.
Sadly, we seem to be falling back into familiar patterns. Unionists are well aware of the ‘opportunities‘ the Conservative/Reform plan represents. Unable to muster the numbers the enforce their will on Northern Ireland by themselves, some Unionists such as Sammy Wilson back Farage’s plan to amend the Good Friday Agreement. Wilson argues that Farage using a majority in Westminster to amend the Agreement is no different than when previous governments overrode Unionist opposition to the Irish sea border to institute the protocol (later the Windsor Framework), though I would hasten to add the protocol did not change anything about the Good Friday Agreement; was done in concert with other stakeholders such as the Republic of Ireland, European Union and United States and that Unionism constituted a minority in Northern Ireland in opposition to a bespoke solution to the Brexit trilemma. These are all factors which will almost certainly not apply should Farage or Badenoch (or Jenrick!) attempt to unilaterally amend the Agreement.
Unionists are also aware of the potent dangers with an editorial in ‘The Newsletter’, which opened with griping about the existing trade border, saying
“Now there is another looming sea border. And this time unionists and friends of unionism in London, some of whom are influential, need to be prepared for it.
The UK, and possibly other European nations, are going to have to quit the European Convention on Human Rights. It was once a vital document, that emerged after a disastrous world war, when Europe had had brutal dictatorships. Now it is used by human rights extremists, academic purists (some of who have spent their careers trying to undermine the UK) and activist judges to, among other things, make policing our borders impossible. To the delight of some of these folk, Britain faces immense cultural upheaval due to a massive population influx. We must quit Strasbourg and NI must do so with Great Britain. Nationalists will not allow this. Nigel Farage, who has been no real friend to unionists, at least sees this problem.”
I agree with that editorial that at some juncture the UK will quit the ECHR, it has become so totemic on the right that it feels as inevitable as a pendulum swinging to the left to swing back to the right in the fullness of time. But the real question is HOW the United Kingdom will leave.
Whilst the rest of Europe would clearly prefer they didn’t leave at all, it seems obvious that the biggest row over their departure will be the impact on the island of Ireland and any attempt to unilaterally rewrite the Good Friday Agreement. It is the height of naivety on the part of the English right to expect they can meddle with the Good Friday Agreement and not expect blowback from northern Nationalists, the Republic, the European Union and perhaps even still allies in the United States. When they attempted it with Brexit and underhanded negotiating tactics, they were eventually compelled to settle for a deal that left Northern Ireland in a special status. Unionists foresee that Farage (either as Prime Minister or as a very influential right-winger for a future right-wing government), who is no great lover of Northern Ireland (as the article quoted earlier where he said it wouldn’t be at the forefront of his thinking over the ECHR) could be severely tempted to employ the same solution again and draw a legal border down the Irish Sea to go with the trade border. They have to pray that his desire that Britain be respected and not seen to bend the knee to Europe overpowers his reticence to go to bat for Northern Irish Unionists wary of any further differentiation. However they will also have to factor in the immense pressure that he will be under to take the easy path (in that it would be supported by all other major stakeholders AND likely a majority of Northern Ireland’s population). Forseeing the problem does not change any of the underlying dynamics at play that resulted in the protocol in the first place, particularly their own weakness. They have to rely on the grace of others to get their way.
In my recent post regarding ‘The Benefits of the Union’ I argued that there was no practical case for the Union anymore, that Unionism was primarily an emotional case, and that the greatest ally Unionism had was the apathy of the centre ground towards change. Apathy is one of the most powerful forces in politics, but it is also the most treacherous. The moment it is overcome, its strength evaporates instantly and this can radically reshape expected outcomes.Colum Eastwood, responding to Farage said…
“the plan announced by Farage was “another rerun of the tired, empty and undeliverable rhetoric of Brexiteers who had no answers for tough questions on what that would mean for the legal framework of the Good Friday Agreement.”
He said the “narrow vision” of Britain’s future espoused by Farage and his party “is making the case for a new Ireland for those who want something different”.Eastwood added: “People on this island see the turmoil in Britain and the narrow, divisive vision of the future being promoted by people like Farage and they increasingly want no part of it.”
And his party leader Claire Hanna, quoted in the Belfast Telegraph, said
“Every few years, right-wing politicians in Britain roll out some supposed ‘big fix’ to complex issues, usually immigration, and every time it collapses under scrutiny.We saw it with Michael Gove and Suella Braverman, and now Nigel Farage is pushing another baseless plan that delivers nothing.Worse still, DUP politicians here are rushing to line up behind Farage in their latest attempt to undermine the Good Friday Agreement.The Agreement belongs to the people of this island. It is not Nigel Farage’s to tear up, nor any other British politician’s. Farage has never had any interest in Northern Ireland and when things get difficult, he will drop Northern Ireland in a heartbeat rather than spend years painstakingly negotiating with Dublin. When there is a real prospect that someone like Nigel Farage could potentially be a future prime minister it is perfectly rational that greater urgency is placed on our constitutional future and makes the case clearer than ever for preparing for a new Ireland.”
All of us can see the storm on the horizon, even if it is years out. A lot can change between now and the time it arrives. Perhaps events will conspire to dissipate it before it ever crashes upon us. But at the moment, the trajectory portends a lot of trouble for us in the 2030s. Brexit, and this proposal is simply an outworking of the same impulse, is not behind us at all.
As William Faulkner said “The past is never dead. It’s not even past”. In the next decade we may come to realise the truth of that.
I’m a firm believer in Irish unity and I live in the border regions of Tyrone.
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