Greenland Purchase a Century too Late

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner 

A component part of the Kingdom of Denmark, with a mostly Inuit population of 56,000, the island of Greenland doesn’t often make the news.

But “Kalaallit Nunaat,” its Inuit name in Kalaallisut or West Greenlandic, has suddenly captured the world’s attention, thanks to U.S. President Donald Trump, who earlier this month suggested that Washington buy the island from the Danes.

His idea was immediately ridiculed by the mainstream American media, always ready to mock Trump. They considered it outlandish, and some even thought he was trying to make it his personal property. 

It also angered Copenhagen. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen called the notion “absurd.” Trump in turn canceled a trip to Denmark.

But was it really that foolish? This wasn’t just a personal whim on the part of Trump, nor was it as ridiculous as it appeared at first glance, because Greenland is of immense economic and geopolitical value.

Most of the world’s largest island is covered in ice, but as it continues to thaw due to global warming, its mineral and energy resources -- including iron ore, lead, copper, zinc, diamonds, gold, uranium and oil -- are becoming more accessible.

Rare earth elements such as terbium, dysprosium, neodymium and praseodymium are also found on Greenland. Many of these are an essential component of smartphones, computers and tablets, as well as many industrial, defence and energy applications, including wind turbines.

Since only a small fraction of this massive island has been properly explored, no one yet knows its full potential.

Greenland’s growing strategic value is linked to new North Atlantic shipping lanes, due to the melting polar ice cap. This is dramatically decreasing maritime travel times between North America and Eurasia, and the island lies astride these routes, which will become a new northwest passage.

The U.S. maintains its northernmost missile-warning, space surveillance and deepwater seaport at the Thule Air Base, which has operated since 1943 on the island.

To boot, other countries have also cast their eyes on Greenland. China proposed building airports and mining facilities there in 2018 but was rebuffed.

There are precedents for the United States acquiring territories from other countries. The 1803 Louisiana Purchase from France nearly doubled the size of the country.

In 1867 Alaska was purchased from tsarist Russia, and 50 years later the American Virgin Islands in the Caribbean were bought from the Danes.

Nor is Trump the first president to think of buying Greenland. Harry Truman offered $100 million for it in 1946. 

Nonetheless, this movement is destined to go nowhere. The days of buying territories and their populations are over.

Maybe Trump doesn’t realize it, but Greenland is virtually a sovereign entity. It was granted home rule in 1979, and today the Nuuk government is responsible for everything except foreign affairs and defence. (The island, unlike Denmark, is not in the EU.) 

Copenhagen couldn’t unilaterally sell the island to the United States even if it wanted to.

Indeed, the political establishment in Greenland has made natural resource extraction a central part of its plans to become economically self-sufficient, and ultimately politically independent, from Denmark.

Bottom line: it was a silly proposal mainly because, in an age of self-determination, it came a century too late.

Political Evolution in Mauritania

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

The Islamic Republic of Mauritania is almost twice the size of France, its former colonial overlord, and straddles the North African Maghreb (it is part of the Arab Maghreb Union) and Sub-Saharan Africa. It is 95 per cent desert, hence its image in the West of endless sand dunes dotted with camels.

Mauritania gained independence from French rule in 1960, but unelected military governments largely ruled the country in the decades to follow.

There are fewer than four million people (two-thirds of them under 26) but, despite being small, this population is exceptionally fractured. It’s divided by language and skin colour.

“Mauritania’s completely racist,” according to one observer. “Everyone knows, but no one talks about it. That’s off limits!”

At the top are the Bidhan, lighter-skinned Arab Berbers, or “white Moors.” They own almost everything. Then come the West Africans. And at the bottom there are the Haratin. They are Moors, too, and speak the same language as the Bidhan, but they’re Black. They used to be the Bidhan’s slaves.

Black and white Moors all speak Hassaniya, a regional form of Arabic. The West Africans speak Wolof, Pulaar and Soninke, plus French.

The country is one of the poorest in the world and has been criticized in the past for a series of social issues, including the force-feeding of women being groomed for marriage as well as an active slave trade.

Despite slavery officially being outlawed in Mauritania in 1981, it exists under a caste system of servitude that forces those in the “slave” caste to work as cattle herders or domestic servants without pay.

Mauritania has tried to crack down on slavery and passed a law in 2015 that made slavery a crime against humanity. But campaigners say this has not been enough to eradicate the practice.

Mauritania’s ruling Union for the Republic party candidate Mohamed Ould Ghazouani, a former general and defence minister, won the country’s presidential election on June 22 with 52 per cent of the vote. It was the first time Mauritanians voted to elect a successor to a democratically elected president in the state.   

Ghazouani’s nearest rival, prominent anti-slavery activist Biram Dah Abeid, came in second with 18.58 per cent. Sidi Mohamed Ould Boubacar, backed by the country’s biggest Islamist party, came in third with 17.87 per cent.

Both losers claimed fraud. “This seems like a coup d’etat,” declared Abeid. “We are united and will lead the contestation” of the outcome.

“We reject the results of the election and we consider that they in no way express the will of the Mauritanian people,” Boubacar added.

Economic issues dominated the election campaign, with outgoing president Mohammed Ould Abdel Aziz largely credited with stabilizing the country after seizing power in a 2008 coup. He was later elected as president in 2009 and 2014 in votes boycotted by the main opposition parties.

Ghazouani once headed the country’s domestic security service and was chief of staff to Abdel Aziz from 2008 to 2018. Not surprisingly, the latter backed Ghazouani. Both are from the ruling Bidhan group.

Mauritania has had its share of extremist violence, but intelligence work and the rehabilitation of imprisoned jihadis has led to a decline in Islamist attacks.

El Salvador Has Become a Basket Case

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

Many of the migrants streaming across the American border with Mexico come from El Salvador. This small poverty-stricken and violence-plagued Central American country has seen more than its fair share of misfortune.

A terrible civil war that lasted from 1979 to 1992 took the lives of approximately 80,000 soldiers and civilians. The military and its allied death squads were responsible for an overwhelming majority of the killings during the war. The archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, was among those murdered.

Nearly half of the country’s population fled, and children were recruited as soldiers by both the military-run government and the left-wing guerrilla group Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN).

El Salvador remains one of the most violent nations in the world, with 69.2 murders per 100,000 residents. (The U.S. rate is 4.6) 

Gangs continue to wreak havoc, two of the most notorious being M-18, known as 18th Street, and M-13 or Mara Salvatrucha.

As a result, there are nearly 1.4 million Salvadorans living in the United States.

Can a new president change all that? The 38-year-old Nayib Bukele, a former mayor of San Salvador, the country’s capital, has promised to bring “a new era” to the country after he won election in early February.

Although he began his political career with the FMNL, Bukele ran as the candidate of the centre-right Grand Alliance for National Unity (GANA).

The FMLN, which agreed to lay down its arms in the peace accords, and the conservative National Republican Alliance (ARENA) had alternated in power since the end of the war.

Bukele, who is of Palestinian ancestry and the son of a Muslim father and a Christian mother, wants to tackle El Salvador’s gang violence and corruption. 

He has called for social programmes to prevent youths from being recruited in the first place, and for social reinsertion programmes to prevent re-offending.

Bukele has acknowledged that the two main forces driving so many to take their chances on a perilous migration north in search of a better life were insecurity and economic duress. He vowed to address the poverty and lack of employment opportunities that so many migrants cite as their reason for fleeing.

Bukele admitted that his country was to blame for driving tens of thousands of its citizens to emigrate every year.

“People don’t flee their homes because they want to,” he said on June 30 at a news conference in San Salvador. “They flee their homes because they feel they have to.

“They fled our country, they fled El Salvador,” he continued. “It is our fault.

They feel safer crossing a desert and three frontiers because they feel that’s more secure than living in the country, he added.

“If people have an opportunity for a decent job, a decent education, a decent health care system and security, I know that forceful migration will be reduced to zero.”

Bukele also wishes to break with the left-wing foreign policy alliances forged by his predecessor in office, Salvador Sanchez Cerén. 

Cerén had maintained close alliances with the rulers of Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba. Instead the new leader will strengthen ties with the United States.

Kamala Harris is Already on First Base

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

With 23 major candidates having entered the race, the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential field is one of the largest, most competitive, and most unpredictable in modern history.

But most of them will soon be history. Of the ones left standing, California’s junior Democratic Senator Kamala Devi Harris, is the most formidable.

The organ of the American political elite, the New York Times, in August ran an op-ed stating that the African American (really, Indian/Jamaican) woman is the one to beat Donald Trump. Many other media outlets have been playing her up as well.

They are behind her because, after all, who is better placed to keep Black radicals and white “deplorables” (Hillary Clinton’s term) in their place than her? She can even co-opt some of the troublemakers in the “squad,” the party’s high-profile four radicals in the House of Representatives, and shut the others up.

They can’t criticize Harris as a racist, misogynist, and the various other labels they hurl at Trump. Harris is a perfect candidate for what sociologist C. Wright Mills decades ago called “the power elite” (still the best book ever written about the American ruling classes).

All the energy, drive, and passion in the party today are on the left. This may be the most aggressively left-wing cycle for Democrats since Senator George McGovern was nominated in 1972.

There will also be an enormous advantage for female candidates, in particular those from minorities in general, and African-Americans in particular.

Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders – too old, too male, too white – have no chance. Elizabeth Warren, a radical woman, comes closer to emerging as a serious contender. But she is strident and comes across like a hectoring schoolmarm, turning many voters off. She’s also, despite fraudulent claims of native American heritage, white. And – too old.

But 54-year-old Harris checks off all the identity boxes. And as the icing on the cake, she is a very passionate, articulate, and compelling public speaker, and quite fierce in debates.

She has many flaws and some controversial history as a prosecutor, San Francisco district attorney, and California attorney general.

Her record has led some critics to describe her not as a progressive reformer but as a relic of a “tough on crime” era going back to the 1990s and 2000s.

However, since her Senate campaign in 2016, Harris has tried to avoid the faulty parts of her record, and instead emphasized the reforms she’s supported and implemented over the years. She has adopted sweeping rhetoric about the criminal justice system, arguing that it needs to be systemically changed.

Trump might exploit some of her negatives, But Harris is not blinded by hubris the way Clinton was. She won’t take victory for granted.

Harris also enjoys the greatest support among other Democratic Party presidential candidates’ supporters, meaning she could consolidate a lot of support when her rivals drop out. Indeed, she is said to be the Democrat whom Trump fears the most and she will be hard to beat.

The first primaries are still five months away, the general election more than a year, but I’m betting on Harris to clinch the Democratic Party nomination and give Trump a real challenge. The forces arrayed against him could very likely make him a one-term president.

India, Israel Grow Closer

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

Indian prime minister Nahendra Modi won a resounding victory in national elections held this past spring, with his coalition gaining a majority of the seats in India’s lower house.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, on the other hand, faces the voters this coming Sept. 17, following an inconclusive election last April, when he failed to form a governing coalition.

The two have much in common ideologically. Both men are nationalists and therefore political allies, as the ties between their two countries grow.

Israel governs the overwhelmingly Muslim Palestinian West Bank, while India has just abolished the special status of Jammu and Kashmir state, its only Muslim-majority entity. The disputed territory has sparked wars between India and Pakistan.

Less than 30 years ago, the very thought of a prominent Indian openly admiring Israel would have been unthinkable. 

India recognized Israel in 1950, but kept its diplomatic relations restricted to a single consular office in Mumbai. In 1975, India became the first non-Arab country to recognize the Palestinian Liberation Organization, with a PLO office set up in Delhi.

All of this was due to the ruling Congress Party’s left-wing secularism, which viewed Zionism as a form of ethnic nationalism.

But things are different now, with the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in power.

Since Modi became India’s leader five years ago, Delhi’s diplomatic policies have shifted dramatically in Israel’s favor. 

Modi became the first Indian prime minister to visit Israel. In July 2017 he and Netanyahu signed cooperative deals on water, space technology, and agriculture. 

But the biggest and most significant deals have centered on defence. Israel’s specialization in high-tech weaponry, from drones to guided missiles, have transformed the Jewish state into a desirable international partner. 

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, from 2014 to 2018 India accounted for 46 per cent of all Israeli weapons sales, not including small arms. In 2018, Reuters reported that India buys around one billion dollars in weapons from Israel every year.

And it’s not just a question of weaponry: police and soldiers from around India have trained in Israel or have been trained by Israeli soldiers in Delhi.

Ideological affinities fuel this partnership. India’s Hindu nationalist right wing takes inspiration from Netanyahu’s hardline Zionism. Both Modi and Netanyahu have campaigned domestically with great success as opponents of “Muslim extremism,” in the one case in Kashmir, in the other in the Palestinian territories.

The BJP is the political arm of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological and cultural crucible of Hindu nationalism.

Their defining text is Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s 1923 book, Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?, which defines the Indian nation as necessarily belonging to a “Hindu race.”

Savarkar saw a parallel in the Jewish story, and expressed his support for Zionism, writing that “if the Zionists’ dreams are ever realized” it would “gladden us almost as much as our Jewish friends.” 

When Netanyahu greeted Modi in 2017, he proclaimed that the relationship between India and Israel is “so natural that we could ask what took so long for to blossom.”

Given the perceived threat both face from their immediate neighbours, that is bound to grow.

Is “Wokeness” Leading America into Political Turmoil?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

The Republican Party in the United States emerged in 1854 to combat the expansion of slavery.

Founded on abolitionism, in 1856 it contested its first presidential election. As the political system disintegrated four years later, Abraham Lincoln won the presidency in a four-way race, precipitating a southern secession of slave states and a terrible Civil War.

Today it is the Democrats who are moving into uncharted left-liberal territory. The force driving this change is the style of moral politics known as “wokeness,” a phenomenon that has become pervasive.

In the past five years, white liberals have moved so far to the left on questions of race and racism that they are now, on these issues, to the left of the typical African-American voter. 

White Democrats started expressing dramatically higher levels of concern about racial inequality and discrimination, while showing greater enthusiasm for racial diversity and immigration.

A large minority of them now regard systemic racial discrimination as a fundamental problem in American life.

During roughly the same time, there has been a large increase in the number of Americans who express positive attitudes about illegal immigration.

The Democrats have adopted a radical new framework that treats any restrictions on immigration and enforcement of current laws as immoral.

Indeed, on key measures of racial attitudes, immigration, health care and other issues, white liberals’ opinion has moved to the left of where Blacks and Latinos are.

Zach Goldberg, a graduate student in political science at Georgia State University, has tracked partisan ideological trends in great detail. 

He found that white liberals recently became the only demographic group in America to display a pro-outgroup bias, meaning that among all the different groups surveyed they were the only one that expressed a preference for other racial and ethnic communities above their own.

They think white people have “too much” political influence.

These very liberal voters stress the environment, protecting immigrants, abortion, and race and gender. They support banning private health insurance, providing insurance to the undocumented, and decriminalizing border entry.

Moderate to conservative Democrats, who are majority non-white, are more concerned with job creation, lowering taxes, and a less totalizing vision of health care reform.

The left-wing Democrats are the most engaged and play a disproportionate role in setting the political agenda.

These white liberals, who now constitute about 40 per cent of the Democratic Party, are the critical drivers of Democratic politicians’ leftward shift on race and identity issues. 

Mainstream Democratic Party politicians are beginning to take for granted that their constituents will embrace the more institutional understanding of racism.

And, to the extent that white liberals now see racism as a looming challenge in a way they did not in the recent past, Donald Trump has become for them a loathsome enemy.

It seems the country now faces a situation similar to the 1850s. Slavery was America’s original sin. It became the chief rallying point for abolitionists determined to uproot it, and civil war engulfed the country in 1861. Today, racial issues are again leading to political chaos.

This time, it won’t be a case of specific states seceding, but rather an upheaval encompassing the whole country.

Israel, India Form Common Front Against 'Muslim Extremism'

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax, NS] Chronicle Herald

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi won a resounding victory in national elections held this past spring, with his coalition gaining a majority of the seats in India’s lower house.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, on the other hand, faces the voters again on Sept. 17, following an inconclusive election last April when he failed to form a governing coalition.

The two have much in common ideologically. Both men are nationalists and therefore political allies, as the ties between their two countries grow.

Israel governs the overwhelmingly Muslim Palestinian West Bank, while India has just abolished the special status of its Jammu and Kashmir state, its only Muslim-majority entity, which is also claimed by Pakistan.

Less than 30 years ago, the very thought of a prominent Indian openly admiring Israel would have been unthinkable.

India recognized Israel in 1950, but kept its diplomatic relations restricted to a single consular office in Mumbai. In 1975, India became the first non-Arab country to recognize the Palestinian Liberation Organization, with a PLO office set up in Delhi.

All of this was due to the ruling Congress Party’s resolute left-wing secularism, which viewed Zionism as a form of ethnic nationalism.

But things are different now, with the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in power.
Since Modi became India’s leader five years ago, Delhi’s diplomatic policies have shifted dramatically in Israel’s favour, and away from India’s traditional alliance with the Palestinians.

Modi became the first Indian prime minister to visit Israel, in July 2017. He and Netanyahu signed new co-operative deals on water, space technology and agriculture.

But the biggest and most significant deals have centered on defence. Israel’s specialization in high-tech weaponry, from drones to guided missiles, have transformed the Jewish state into a desirable international partner.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, from 2014 to 2018, India accounted for 46 per cent of all Israeli weapons sales, not including small arms. In 2018, Reuters reported that India buys around $1 billion in weapons from Israel every year.

And it’s not just a question of weaponry: police and soldiers from around India have trained in Israel or have been trained by Israeli soldiers in Delhi.

In September 2014, a few months after Modi’s election, a joint steering committee on homeland security met in Israel to discuss border security and police trainings.

Ideological affinities fuel this partnership. India’s Hindu nationalist right wing takes inspiration from Netanyahu’s hardline Zionism. Both Modi and Netanyahu have campaigned domestically with great success as opponents of “Muslim extremism,” in the one case in Muslim-majority Kashmir, in the other the Palestinian territories.

The BJP is the political arm of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological and cultural crucible of Hindu nationalism.

The defining ideological text of the RSS is Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s 1923 book, Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?, which defines the Indian nation as necessarily belonging to a “Hindu race.”

Savarkar saw a parallel in the Jewish story, and expressed his support for Zionism, writing that “if the Zionists’ dreams are ever realized” it would “gladden us almost as much as our Jewish friends.”

When Netanyahu greeted Modi in 2017, he proclaimed that the relationship between India and Israel is “so natural that we could ask what took so long for it to blossom.” A Hindu nationalist India is now aligned with a right-wing Zionist Israel.

Democracy is in Decline in the Middle East

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

The past few years have not been conducive to political liberalization in the Middle East.

Political repression worsened in Egypt, where President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in the spring of 2018 was re-elected with 97 per cent of the vote after security forces arbitrarily detained potential challengers. 

In Saudi Arabia, after the government drew praise for easing its draconian ban on women driving, authorities arrested high-profile women’s rights activists and clamped down on even mild forms of dissent. 

Evidence also mounted that in late 2018 Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had personally ordered the assassination of self-exiled critic and columnist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul.

The murder put a spotlight on authoritarian regimes’ aggressive pursuit of prominent critics. Turkey itself, which sought to keep Khashoggi’s murder on the front pages, has by its own account captured 104 of its citizens from 21 countries over the last two years in a global crackdown on perceived enemies of the state.

In Syria, hundreds of thousands of civilians from certain ethnic and religious groups have been killed or displaced as world powers either fail to respond adequately or even facilitate the violence.

The ongoing four-year civil war in Yemen, seen mainly as a proxy conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran, has killed thousands and left millions on the brink of starvation, with an estimated 50,000 people dying from war-related famine.

In Lebanon, parliamentary elections took place in 2018 for the first time since 2009, after repeated postponements of the balloting. But all is not well beneath the surface.

The Shia Hezbollah guerrilla movement exercises de facto control over the fractured country, to such an extent that it is impossible to differentiate between them and the Lebanese state.  

The movement itself retained its previous level of representation in parliament --13 out of 128 seats -- but the bloc of which it is a part won just over half of the seats in parliament.

It is now in the governing coalition and holds ministerial portfolios.

Aligned with and supported by the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hezbollah’s superior military strength when compared with the Lebanese Armed Forces, and its ability to go to war at a time of its own choosing, mean that the state and the group are in effect indistinguishable.

Hezbollah has around 25,000 full time fighters, along with 20-30,000 reservists. They possess some 150,000 rockets, thousands of anti-tank missiles as well as anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles.

Given this deteriorating situation in the region, it should therefore come as no surprise that a recent survey in the Arab world shows that more than half of its young adults – some 52 per cent -- are considering emigrating.

The Big BBC News Arabic Survey, a joint assessment by BBC News Arabic and Arab Barometer, a Princeton University-based non-partisan research network, was the largest in-depth survey ever carried out in the region. Over 25,000 people in 10 countries and the Palestinian Territories participated in interviews for the study between October 2018 and April 2019.

Economic factors were cited in the survey as the predominant reason for emigration. Conflict and instability have increased the rate of economic decline.

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.