Bad Faith in No.10.

It feels to me rather as it did to W.H.Auden in 1939*, when he found himself ‘Uncertain and afraid/As the clever hopes expire/Of a low dishonest decade.’  It becomes clearer by the day that P.M.Johnson negotiated his Brexit Withdrawal Agreement, and in particular its Irish Protocol, in bad faith. He made clear his cavalier disregard for its provisions promptly enough, saying at the outset - ‘“There’s no question of there being checks on goods going NI/GB or GB/NI”. On his visit to Northern Ireland in November last year, he promised business leaders there would be “No forms, no checks, no barriers of any kind” attached to trade across the Irish Sea under the new regime. Numerous statements from the EU side, and not a few from the British, have made it clear that this is false.

     Normal accountability has been shut down, by the simple expedient of not allowing ministers to face hard questions; those radio and television programs on which such questions are generally asked have been boycotted. Access to briefings for troublesome political correspondents is denied. Indeed Mr Johnson was also supposed to have purged troublesome Tories from party and government, but has already fired or lost three key ministers - Northern Ireland Secretary, Attorney General and Chancellor of the Exchequer - who were evidently insufficiently compliant.

     Meanwhile Mr Johnson’s new chief negotiator, Mr David Frost, was supposed to put some kind of respectable intellectual case for all this, at his recent speech to the Université Libre de Bruxelles. According to The Spectator’s print-out, he kicked off with this:- ‘So in 1790 Edmund Burke, one of my country’s great political philosophers, wrote a pamphlet that is justly famous, in the UK, in any case, called ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’. And my title echoes that tonight. It is not just history, that work is highly relevant today and indeed lots of modern British conservative politicians who would consider themselves to be intellectual heirs of Burke.’

     Pity his English is so bad for an intellectual heir of Burke’s, who could indeed write good English; then of course he was not English, but an Anglo-Irishman born in Dublin, to a Protestant father and a Catholic mother (like myself, I may add, though I travelled in the opposite direction, from England to Ireland). The references to him come thick and fast:-

‘The state, to Burke, was more of an organic creation, entwined with custom, of tradition and spirit.

‘I think in Britain the EU’s institutions, to be honest, never felt like that. They were more abstract, they were more technocratic, they were more disconnected from or indeed actively hostile to national feeling. So in a country like Britain where institutions just evolved and where governance is pretty deep-rooted in historical precedent, it was always going to feel a bit unnatural to a lot of people to be governed by an organisation whose institutions seemed created by design not than by evolution, and which vested authority outside the country elsewhere.’

     Where does one begin? Auden again:- ‘All I have is a voice/To undo the folded lie’. For a start, the notion that the United Kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland in the 18th century were ‘an organic creation, entwined with custom, of tradition and spirit’ is of course absurd. No wonder Burke bailed out of Ireland, to live in the affluent metropolitan bubble of London. Anyway, if he were honest, he would have to go back before the Reformation to find an England that was indeed anything like ‘an organic creation of tradition and spirit’. Auden again:-  ‘Accurate scholarship can/Unearth the whole offence/ From Luther until now/ That has driven a culture mad’.

     In fact England was spiritually part of Europe since long before nation states were even thought of, but in the Ireland of Burke’s day, the Catholics were a dispossessed people, who were not even permitted an education. Meanwhile, in both Britain and Ireland, the bulk of the people were beginning a long slide into destitution and squalor, even while the few were reaping massive profits from slavery and exploitation.

     So ‘institutions just evolved’ in Britain, did they? Tell that to the slaves transported from Africa to toil in the colonial plantations, or to the Irish and the Scots, or to King Charles I, or the representatives of the old Church who were hanged, drawn and quartered, or even the heirs of the kind of 18th century idyll envisioned by our friend Mr Frost, whose world was brutally shattered by the wars of the 20th century. How does the man think he can get away with such tripe? Anyway, can he really expect us to take his boss seriously as an old-world conservative?

     Yet there are a few lessons that he might have learnt from Burke, such as that ‘Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.’  In truth it is the European Union that has been doing the evolving for the last 50 years, and it remains an ongoing project. It should be unnecessary to repeat, with the Doomsday Clock at two minutes to midnight, that we face huge threats; another saying of Burke’s is relevant:- ‘When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.’  We should also bear in mind that ‘Liberty must be limited in order to be possessed.’

     It is very difficult to unite good men, even if any such are to be found! In truth, if the European project is to have any future, it will have to be more mindful of its roots and real friends; one might look up the Catholic social doctrine of subsidiarity for a start. We will also have to learn again how our sins may be forgiven. Nonetheless, to quote Auden’s poem for the last time, ‘We must love one another or die!’

Burke thought that with the French Revolution ‘the glory of Europe was extinguished forever.’  Little did he know how much worse things could get! Nowadays a generation has grown up for whom the World Wars, the Holocaust, and the whole disaster which generated the modern European movement, are ancient history. They often appear to think that the peace and prosperity which they have enjoyed for the last half century in Europe can be taken for granted. They are wrong. We can only hope that they will not have to find this out in an even harder way than their forebears!

*'September 1, 1939'