Boris, Britain and Brexit

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

The forward march of the Brexiteers has a new commander at the helm: the newly-minted Conservative prime minister Boris Johnson.

He had been waiting in the wings as his sad sack predecessor, who was more a Chamberlain than a Churchill in her ineffectual attempts to deliver the deal, slowly expired politically.

Theresa May never really had her heart in it, and those who wanted Britain to remain tied to the empire known as the European Union knew it and blocked her every move. These enemies included the apparatchiks in Brussels as well as MPs in her own as well as the Labour and Scottish Nationalist parties.

She wanted, to use an old Polish proverb, “to kill the chicken without shedding blood.”

Johnson wants out by Oct. 31, come what may. He has set himself up as the man who will cut the Gordian knot – in other words, by finding an approach that renders the perceived constraints of the problem moot.

True enough, Northern Ireland’s land border with the Irish Republic is an irritant, and the government at Westminster is dependent on the votes of the Protestant Democratic Unionists to keep it afloat. Otherwise, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who has been accused of anti-Semitism, might end up governing the country.

And we must remember that the full name of the party Johnson himself now leads is known as the Conservative and Unionist Party.

The border is a matter of great political, security and diplomatic sensitivity in Ireland. The backstop, to maintain a seamless border on the island of Ireland, is a position of last resort.

Johnson knows that Irish Republicans on both sides of that border want the Protestant entity to eventually be swallowed up by Dublin. This is the bedrock position of all Irish Nationalists, from the Irish Republican Army to the mildest Irish Catholic. This will never change.

The partition of 1922 always rankles, and as the hundredth anniversary of that deal approaches we will hear much more about it from Sinn Féin and others, you can be sure.

Maybe most readers of this column pay less attention to this issue, but words matter. Most of us have been used to the country’s name being Great Britain. The full name is, of course, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The Irish part is what makes it “the United Kingdom.”

But few people called it that until the past few years – it was a seldom-used, somewhat legalistic term.

Today, though, it is regularly referred to, in newspapers, on television, and elsewhere, as the United Kingdom or UK. Why this change? It strikes me as strange – and I lived in, and received a PhD from a university, in Britain. Back then, no one called it the United Kingdom, except in official documents.

Its sudden use relates to fears that Northern Ireland, and perhaps even Scotland, may leave the Union if everything falls apart. Northern Ireland remains Britain’s Achilles Heel.

So yes, there’s a lot at stake as Britain enters the fourth year of negotiations with the Brussels proconsuls. Hopefully Boris Johnson will get past all the claptrap that gets in the way, because there will be a “no-deal” Brexit or no Brexit at all.