Fintan O'Toole: Brexit: Ireland and the English Question

[Music] so i think the title politics of pain says it all it's perfect um the brexit vote the referendum in 2016 is seen as having had an enormously divisive effect i want to have a sense from you as to well the breakdown of the vote is interesting since northern ireland and scotland voted remain but your sense of of what was behind the vote what was behind the the positive vote on on the side of the english and the welsh so obviously when you get something as large as this they're going to be many factors feeding into it but i think the biggest one is something that and i blame myself as much as anybody else we should have seen coming and that nobody really saw coming and it's english nationalism if you look at the brexit vote it's um very largely concentrated in non-metropolitan england so if you take out london and one or two of the other major cities london from the you know the cotswolds and and the tory shires up to the old steel towns the old working-class heartlands uh all of those parts of england are the places in which the brexit vote is 65 70 even 80 and the reason we should have seen this coming was because something extraordinary was happening that was happening quietly but nonetheless was really showing up very much in in social surveys uh which was that the english were beginning to assert themselves as a political community they were beginning to say actually you know what this british thing we're not that interested in it anymore we want to be english again and nobody paid much attention to this because no political party was was driving it the media were largely ignoring it so so it wasn't like it was something that you know people were being told to feel so it was organic and it was it was coming out of i think in retrospect things that we should have expected the english are a very proud nation they they you know a very long history um arguably england was the first functioning nation state in the world in in our terms going right back to the 14th century they had a language they had a set of customs and laws they had all the things that you would associate with nation state very early and a very strong proud identity why are we surprised that it's coming back well we're surprised because it did an extraordinary thing in a way it sort of faked its own death you know it it rolled itself into two other constructs one of which was the empire of course and the other which was the union with scotland wales and ireland from from 1800 and englishness was sort of contained within these other structures so if those two structures change well then you would expect english to re-emerge and the empire is gone not everybody knows it but it is gone um and the union began to change radically in the late 1990s two big things happened late 1990s the belfast peace agreements in northern ireland 1998 and the following year the scottish parliament was established and what you begin to see coming up really in surveys into the beginning of this century is the english withdrawing mentally from the union and we should have seen this the 2011 national census the last census that was been taken in the uk a large majority of people in england offered the choice but do you think of yourself as british british and english or english large majority said english only and they also the big surveys were asking things like who represents england who should make the laws for england and the most basic questions do you think it's okay that westminster the parliament the union parliament in westminster makes laws for england no suddenly the english are saying no in in in 2012 big survey asked that question do you think the status quo where westminster makes the laws for england is okay 24 of english people said yeah it's okay the status quo was okay three-quarters of them were saying i don't want my laws for me as an english person made in westminster this is extraordinary stuff and we weren't paying attention to it because i said there was no there was no political movement there was no real media attention paid to it but this was going to emerge somewhere and it emerged in a kind of frustration that nobody's listening to us nobody nobody pays attention nobody's even naming the fact that we think of ourselves as a political community and wants to be recognized as such and the first opportunity that english got to give somebody a kick and say pay attention to us was was the brexit rights and therefore in retrospect it's not that surprising that they took that opportunity to say we want to be paid attention to the irony is that brexit actually doesn't answer any of those questions you know it really doesn't meet the needs that were there but i think this is an underlying force and one we're still grappling with what are the implications of the rising of english nationalism for scotland for wales for for ireland because of course we've all been intertwined for for so long that uh if if if this is happening it's it's it's seismic in terms of all of those relationships within the islands it's a reflection of trends that are happening elsewhere of course i mean in europe throughout europe it's happening here in the united states it's happening uh some of the same grievances are arising you're talking about the relationship between england and the rest of the united kingdom step by for a second and talk about the relationship um between the united kingdom and the eu to what extent well it almost feels like there was ambivalence all along for example you know not going in with the euro keeping keeping uh the currency uh not going along with the senjun arrangement of of uh open borders throughout the eu so there was ambivalence from the start how did that grow very deep i think um i think if you look at it historically you know when the british joined in 1973 if you i've been looking at a lot of the debates at that time and even going back into the 1960s when they first applied to join and you have this very deep ambivalence you know you have a lot of opinion which says you know that this is a human it would be a humiliation for britain to to find itself in this alliance after all we we beat these people in the war yeah not that long ago yeah and here you know this is we we we saved the french as they would see it and we beat the germans and this is a franco-german alliance and we're being kind of brought in almost on sufferance you know as sort of second-class members of it we don't want that so there's a lot of that there there's also a lot of even on the point of from the point of view people who want to join saying what choice do we have you know it's kind of a famous quip about england having lost an empire not found a role there's a lot of that in public consciousness you know people are talking about this talking about you know well if we don't do this where else are we in the world we're not an empire anymore do we just become a kind of satellite of america you know a lot of that thinking so even among considerable amounts of people who think actually yes we should join it's it's resignation to it rather than an excitement about isn't this a fantastic project and we can go in there we can have a huge influence on it now actually what really happened was they did go in and they did have a huge influence on it i mean the single market which they're now leaving was largely a british design you know it was driven very largely by the british the the huge amount of the work that went into actually designing how it would function uh was was was initiated by the british um and the british in fact found themselves in a very influential position but the popular narrative so if if you look at the newspapers being completely dominated by right-wing moguls a guy called rupert murdoch you may have heard of who um has no influence in american politics but but a hugely influential figure in in in british politics and british popular culture and so you have instead of having any positive narrative about british british membership of the european union it's always these people are really just a kind of new version of the nazis it's a german-dominated conspiracy it's dominant you know it's dominating us it's it's and this is ludicrous i mean it is it is frankly one of the most extraordinary things we've seen in in in modern history where what you get is the invention of oppression lots of people have been oppressed over the years you may like the european union you may not like it but it's not an oppressor right it's not the nazis you know it's it's a you know a complex tedious negotiated set of institutions um in which people voluntarily surrender some of their sovereignty to to amplify their sovereignty that's what happens but if you look at the narrative in the british press really from the 1970s onwards it's it's hugely dominated by the fact that there are all of these europeans making these horrible regulations which are taking away our freedom and if you ask what are they actually doing well they're stopping us eating prawn cocktail flavored crisps i i you know this is very funny and it really is very funny but i kid you not this is a huge issue that boris johnson as a journalist invents right that so there's a european regulation that says if it's a potato product or it says it's a political product it cannot contain more than 50 added sugar you know it's not a particularly oppressive regulation right barcelona says this you know it's a great british tradition to make exotic flavored crisps and to do this you have to add a lot of sugar so so these people how dare they they're trying to stop us feeding our children with strong cocktail flavored crisps you know i mean they the european union is stopping us recycling tea bags no they're not they're stopping donkey rides on beaches i mean this is and it's it's most of it is fictional most of it is absurd and ludicrous but if you ask people in sunderland what's the european union it's it's those busybody people who have been interfering with our freedom so this very much feeds into this this this kind of nationalist narrative you see what does nationalism want to do you know the narrative is we are being oppressed we want to throw off that oppression and so it allows the country which is not by any historical standards oppressed to sort of almost imagine itself masochistically into a position that we're being oppressed by these horrible people and therefore brexit becomes an act of liberation um the problem is if if all you've been liberated from is fictional constraints then it doesn't actually happen very much you're not any better off because the constraints were not real in the first place so this resistance to integration is there are some real world uh anxieties you've had the eurozone crisis the economic crisis that sense of of contagion when you're integrated um immigration was a a large issue um were there others that that that were literally sort of issue oriented that that abs that drove it as well so you fed the sense of resentment yes so i think there are um one of the big things that's underlying it is uh particularly coming from the from the right you know the right being of the tory party is you always have to remember there's a very strong agenda to in a way complete the agenda of tertiarism you know the patriotism this market philosophy this this breaking up of the state handing over the public services particularly the health service all of those kind of things to market forces was never completed and the european union is seen as a kind of super state um and therefore a constraint on on the the final yeah right destiny so coming from the from from a very influential section of the tory party you've got that driver but it means something completely different right which is that's not what's appealing to the working-class communities in in sunderland for example voting for brexit they want the opposite they want a state to protect them they want all of these public services they want to feel the security so brexit is is in in this sense yes it's driven by all of these kind of things but they're often complete opposites and the key to the brexit referendum was david cameron's extraordinary arrogance in one's very simple respect what he could have done is he could have lifted the phone and he could have spoken to his good friend the irish prime minister at the time and kenny and said you guys do referendums so in ireland we have a referendum about something almost every year we have a written constitution and it can be changed by popular vote right so we have a referendum about almost every year we have we have a referendum california yeah well you know we don't exactly so we've had like really big ones like you know this year we we voted on abortion which is a really divisive issue and and liberalized abortion laws two years ago we we brought in same-sex marriage very reference so we know how we know how to do this stuff we know how it works and it would have been really interesting if dave cameron had just said look okay how does this thing work when you call reference like what actually really happens and the first thing i can tell them is it won't be just about what's on the ballot paper you know a referendum gives people all sorts of emotional outlets you know to to say i'm really angry about this and therefore i'm going to take it out on them you know in in this moment and there's a very simple way of dealing with this you make each side write down in great detail what happens if you vote yes if you vote no if you vote to leave what happens if you vote to remain what happens the scottish independence referendum was defeated in 2014 because whatever you think about scottish independence or the scottish national nationalist party which is in power in scotland they were very responsible about calling a referendum on scottish independence this is a big thing to do we have to put it down on paper and they produced a 900 page documents about what independence would look like and they lost it on that actually because that meant that there was a there was a discussion in in the course of where people said actually that thing you say on page 747 about currency arrangements isn't very convincing you know and you had a real discussion then about about what what are you actually saying is going to happen the pro leave side in the brexit referendum had a completely free ride they could say whatever they liked they could make stuff up which they did about about you know there was going to be 350 million pounds a week extra for the health service but also they didn't have to agree among themselves about what brexit would look like so you had a range of opinion about you know what kind of brexit should you have this is one of the reasons why it's become so became you know as a project because it didn't have it's it's like a revolution with no revolutionary program worked out you know um so you know french revolution you kind of know there's things about liberty equality fraternity you wanted to or the you know soviet revolution you've got communism where you you have a very clear kind of program it may not be in fact fulfilled at least you kind of have an idea as to what you want to do whereas the brexiteers are this kind of whole bunch of contradictions very different kinds of impulses you have ultra free market libertarian people have no problem with immigration for example and then you've a lot of the voters who said i wanted to vote to get those people those polish people up the street i want them gone and i want them gone now you know so you've got these very very different kinds of impulses so it's it's it's it's a sort of national revolution in a way but a very incoherent and incomplete one which really doesn't know what it wants and it doesn't actually address a lot of the concerns of the people who who voted for it so so take us to northern ireland and ireland and and the implications of brexit for that for that relationship uh northern ireland uh voted to remain at what about 55 56 of the majority um it has had this soft border with the republic of ireland um ireland remains part of the eu northern ireland would presumably as part of the united kingdom leave what does that mean for the relationship what does it mean in commercial terms what does it mean what will be the economic impact for example so it's it's it's deeply disturbing and reckless it's it's it's like it's like somebody with very heavy boots going in and stamping all over your garden you know where you've got these very tender plants that are just beginning to grow um i mean you'll all be aware that there you know there was a 30-year long really really really vicious conflict that that seemed interminable that actually for many of us who lived through it you know there was just a sense of despair that this this because it was it was horrific but not horrific enough in a way it could continue there was a phrase used by a british politician but unacceptable level of violence you know so you have this kind of obscenity of of you know a murder day you've just kind of awful awfulness in this very small community you know a million and a half people it's one of the great achievements of late 20th century diplomacy in politics to have actually solved that you know and in retrospect it now looks like we were very lucky because we had a certain kind of confluence like the stars aligned you had bill clinton had come to power in the us with all the confidence that clinton had in his first term you know could do no wrong tony blair came to power in britain at the time when he was completely untarnished a huge majority could do no wrong the paramilitary organizations who had been driving the violence the leadership in both sides had kind of reached the point where they were getting older middle-aged they were beginning to think oh my god are my kids going to go through the same stuff as i've gone through so you've had this and you had irish governments ireland itself was modernizing in a lot of ways liberalizing a lot of ways the old kind of very narrow nationalism was was was being challenged and people were open to new ways of thinking so these things aligned and we got a peace process which is absolutely not perfect qualified in all sorts of ways but it's utterly remarkable i mean it's a great human achievement and it was an achievement that was primarily irish and british these two historical enemies you know work together with absolute clarity and closeness to bring it about but it was also underpinned by both the united states which was really kind of very important guarantor and friends throughout the process of course george mitchell senator george mitchell chaired the process with the man should go straight to heaven you know i mean remember when john paul too soon well yeah well you know when you know they should make somebody a saint even when they're alive you know i think you know the patients they could enjoy the patience he showed to to deal with all of this stuff was was remarkable and the european union was was a guarantor as well so you so you had all these kind of things aligned a very delicate process and really what the process was trying to do was to say look you have a problem here which is a historic problem which goes back to you know well you have you can count you know 700 years 800 years whatever beginning point you want in order to solve it you've got to do something really radical you've got to stop thinking about identity as being monolithic so if you ask the question are you irish or british do you want a united ireland or do you want to stay part of the united kingdom you were only going to get polar opposite answers and you there was no meeting point it was a zero-sum game so the british used to always kind of super seriously joke about the irish that whenever the irish question was about to be solved the irish would would change the question and actually changing the question was a really good idea which was instead of saying what is your identity and are you willing to die for it you said what could you live with what way of thinking about identity would would be okay so that you could actually get back to some kind of normal life and what it came up with was a very very brilliant delicate complex arrangement which said everybody in northern ireland has a right to be and this is the quotation from the agreement that says the birthright of everyone in northern ireland would be irish or british or both as they may so choose very radical rethinking of what identity means right saying your identity might be multiple it's a matter of choice so therefore it's in your head yeah and because it's in your head it could change it's contingent it's open so this happened 20 years ago we're marking the the 20th anniversary of this year and we all knew it was going to be a long-term process so it was first of all about stopping the violence letting that bitterness letting that kind of awful cycle just just stop and that that takes a while and then trying to build some kind of trust trying to build some sort of normality getting people just kind of living an ordinary life and after all of the suffering northern ireland needed about 20 years of boredom you know just ordinariness not being epic you know just just just getting on with early life and the fact that the border had more or less disappeared it was a huge factor in this so it just meant that if i get on the train for like one of my earliest childhood memories getting on the train from from dublin to go to belfast we used to go shopping in belfast and smuggle things back and certain things were cheaper we used to go up kind of thin and come back really really fat because that you would your mother would dress you in about four layers of clothing was cheaper so they found about four layers of clothing you'd be released on the strength saying i mean why do i have to wear all these clothes but but you know i vividly remember the you know the train would stop on the border and the police would get on and they would search and they would look at you and you know it was very hostile kind of thing so it the border itself was a source of conflict it didn't just sort of represent the conflict it actually sort of drove it in a way because people had to be conscious of it all the time now when i go on the train i i i struggle to remember where exactly was the point of the border you know i know of course broadly speaking this is around where it was i can't i can't even identify it anymore bizarrely enough i said to people they think i'm making it up but it's actually true the only reason i know that i've crossed the border is my my mobile phone pings and there's a message from my mobile phone company and i swear to god i'm not i'm not joking the message says you are now roaming in europe um so this may sound very banal it's just about ordinary life but that's the entire point of it right it allows businesses to function huge numbers of businesses function across border particularly agricultural food businesses you know one of the things you have to remember if you don't know the irish border there's no particular reason why a lot of you should i'm sure some of you are would know it but but if you don't let me just i i was promised to try to avoid numbers but let me just give you two numbers right if you don't understand it's just a very quick way of understanding it one number is 137 and the other number is 208. 137 is the entire number of border crossings on the entire eastern flank of the european union so if you go from the baltic all the way down you know all the way down through moldova russia you know down to turkey there are 137 border crossings in that vast terrain on the irish border there are 208 official border crossings right there had to be a team of civil servants joined team of civil servants from north and south with brexit try to figure out how many border crossings are there they came up with 208 but everybody knows that it's actually an infinite number because in a lot of cases it's it's somebody's field it's it's a little stream that you can put two planks across it's you have to remember this was never designed to be a border and it's it's if it was you would you know if you were designing bars you would fire the people who came up with this one because it it squiggles around all sorts of things you can you could be driving along and you may have crossed the border five times without knowing it you know it just goes all over the place the reason is because it was never meant to be a border it was supposed to be a kind of temporary arrangement when the island was partitioned in 1921 there was this kind of well very disputed agreements that that that six northeastern counties would remain part of the united kingdom with the protestant majority who wanted to be part of the uk and the 26 other counties would which were catholic majorities would would form the irish free state which became the irish republic and the border question was kind of left over because being said actually it's very complicated why don't we set up a border commission a boundary commission as it was called and we'll work on a proper border and they spent five years doing this and they couldn't agree so the status quo just remains in place with this kind of crazy border and in a way it sort of didn't matter too much but now it matters so so what you're now saying is that this border which was never meant to be a border which is unpoliceable uncontrollable remember the british during the during the troubles the british had well at any given point i mean they had 10 000 troops on the border but at some point 30 000 troops on the border helicopters watchtowers very sophisticated technology could not stop the ira from taking you know bombs bullets guns whatever across any time they wanted you know because it's we so we know it's an unpoliceable border it's it's the most porous border as you can possibly imagine and you're now proposing with brexit to make this border not just an international frontier but a frontier between a block of 27 countries and an outside country you know so something that has never ever been in its in its history and could never have been envisaged by anybody and so this is this is deeply reckless because it sort of says you know that thing you've been doing over there you irish people well actually you know we don't care about it anymore and we're going to stop it and this is not me as an irish person saying this there's there's there's two pieces of research they asked leave voters there was a big survey the people who voted leave were asked the question very directly would the destruction of the irish peace process be a price worth paying for brexit 83 of leave voters said yes absolutely and there's another survey just out just that last week which says pretty much the same thing as conservatives members of the conservative party would you be prepared to destroy the rsps process to have brexit be a success 80 percent yes it's absolutely extraordinary and i don't want to be emotive about it you know i don't want to blame people about it but but it is an act of extraordinary recklessness you know to say actually we don't really care what's going on over there and of course the irony of this is kind of saying you people are foreign even while at the same time insisting you're part of the united kingdom this is it britain's own territory this is not you know it's not somewhere off in the mid-atlantic you know this is a place that britain claims to be an absolutely integral part of its own territory so there's a kind of recklessness here there's no thought about it there's there's no real plan and so what the irish government has had to do is to say look we can't trust you on this you know if so everybody is saying so it looks very simple everybody's saying there cannot be a hard border you know including british governments british governments european union the irish government everybody's saying can't be a hardboard you can't go back to that so that looks very simple if you all agree what's the problem and british is saying look just trust us on us we'll we'll work out something after we've done the deal with the european union and we're going to get this fabulous deal and it's going to give us you know we're going to have cake and eat cake and everything is going to be just wonderful so of course there'll be no border it'll be fine and the irish government i think reason enough has been forced to say look we can't take it on trust that it's going to be fine this is this is a really serious matter for us i mean this is an existential question for us and you have no plan here you have absolutely no sense at all of of how you're going to achieve this thing that we all agree we must achieve so this is where you get this i won't bore you with all the the bureaucratic language but this the backstop you may have heard of which is the thing that's now stopping brexit which is the european union actually your european union not just the irish government the european union in concert with the earth government is saying there can be no agreements with britain we're not doing any deal with you until you have a guarantee about the fact that there will be no irish border and not a sort of trust us about this but an actual legal international guarantee it has to be placed in stone as something that that and what the irish and the europeans are saying is look if you can come up with another solution fine absolutely you know if you think there's some magical technological solution that you can have a border between the european union and britain that has no infrastructure at all that never existed in human history before do you think you can do it well fine we're all delighted with that but all we're saying is if you can't there's a fail safe which is that you're guaranteeing that there won't be one and therefore you're going to have to do certain other things and of course the other things mean that really the only way that i think this can work still is if the uk has a very soft brexit if it stays within the european customs union and in large parts of the single market but of course that's exactly what it's saying at the moment that it will not do and that's why the eur the talks are in such a quagmire i mean they've been unable to move forward and it's all about the irish issue you know the irish issue is absolutely central to the whole thing and it's a great example of the return of the repressed you know if you if you don't talk about it if you ignore it it's going to come back and bite you and that's really what's happening with the brexit process now and so what are the chances then of a compromise in which northern ireland can uh can in fact be sort of separated off from brexit be allowed to be part of the eu even though it's part of the united kingdom so um the eu to be fair to it and i've often been a critic of the eu but it's actually been pretty extraordinary on this issue um so the the eu negotiation that michel barnier who's leading the team um and and really everybody from the european side has spoken about this has said but barney said simply that there are three things the british have to sort out before we can get into talking about the final deal what the relationship's going to look like people money ireland people is just mutual rights between you know citizens of uk going to be living in european union countries what are their rights and vice versa you know complicated bit of tuning from but it's like you know it's normal diplomacy right it's the sort of stuff that negotiators do it's fixable it's pretty much agreed money was a divorce bill right which was how much is how much how many ongoing commitments does the uk have to the european union budget and what does that translate it to in terms of money it translates into about 40 billion pounds sterling it's fine it's done you know that's kind of agreed ireland is the one that's not agreed right for all the reasons we've been talking about and i genuinely think the british thought look the irish are kind of small you know when it comes to it when is the big kind of you know the last minute summit the way these things are done we'll just fudge the irish thing come on you know it who cares you know there'll be a formula of words and i think they miscalculated really fundamentally about this you know that they thought ireland could be bullied but they also thought the european union would say oh they are bloody irish let's you know let's forget about it and in fact this has not happened there hasn't been a single cigarette paper between the irish position the european union position so what the european union has done is it's been very generous and it said look brexit's really difficult for us we're a rule-bound organization your opinion is just a set of rules and if we start playing fast and loose with those rules and say well you can do a bit of this and you can do a bit of that the whole thing will collapse however they've said look our north island is kind of first of all they've suffered a lot right it's a it's it's it's a part of the world it's had a really hard time secondly it's small it's a million and a half people it's not going to threaten the entire structure of the european union so let's be generous let's say in your case you can have the best of both worlds right we're not saying you have to leave the uk so therefore legally in sovereignty terms you'd be leaving the european union however you can continue to act as if you're in the european union and one of the reasons they've they've done this is because it's a very hard thing to remember but under the peace deal 1998 peace deal every single person in northern ireland has an absolute right to european union citizenship that cannot be changed by brexit why because they have a right to irish citizenship so if you can be irish or british or both the the legal manifestation of that is you're entitled to an irish passport you're entitled to our citizenship and therefore because nobody thought about this at the time because the idea that they would be leaving the european union never never arose but the implications of it now are that you have you have this million and a half people who have an absolute right to european union citizenship it cannot be taken away from them it's guaranteed in international law the belfast agreement is not just an internal document it's an international treaty registered with the united nations it's a full piece of international law so how do you vindicate the rights of this million and a half people who are going to remain european union citizens outside the european union so your opinion has actually been quite generous and said look we'll you know whatever works we'll we'll do there cannot be a hard border this is just you know this would this would be doing violence to the peace process we're not going to allow that so what they've said is look why don't you just have like a very backroom kind of arrangement whereby goods moving between northern ireland and the rest of of the uk so the islands of you know northern northern ireland there the islands of britain so if you're moving to scotland or moving to england with goods going back and forward you could you could have checks the the key word the european union has been using is de-dramatizing this of course brexit has its own language that occurs and t dramasize just means look let's not make this a big issue let's just try and get it down to really kind of boring bureaucratic detail which is what these people do very well you know let's find a way that a customs official in liverpool could go and look at a ship that's going to northern ireland and say actually that stuff is fine but that stuff doesn't make the rules you know it's it see let's do it nobody would ever be aware of this i mean this stuff happens anyway this you know it's just kind of checking goes on anyway so just you'd have more of that they're even saying this could be done by british officials you know we will work out a way to do this the problem is that at the moment the british government's history is an awful joker you know it throws in these kind of hand grenades just when you don't need another one so just with all the brexit stuff going on of course theresa may called an election in 2017 thinking she would win a massive overall majority lost seats is now in a minority position and the joke of history was she's being propped up by a small party from northern ireland which is uh the the democratic union's party it's the most historically the most extreme protestant unionist party it has 10 members of parliament not a huge number but that 10 hold a balance of power and they're keeping theresa may in office they're saying if you do anything like what the european union is proposing however de-dramatized it is it makes northern ireland different from the rest of the uk if you've got checks going from britain to northern ireland you're saying we're different we're not the same as every other part of the uk that's a threat to our unionist identity and we will bring down your government if you do this and that's what's happening right now so the only solution to this right is is what your opinion has suggested there's really no other way of doing this right which which is just if if you don't want to have a hard border on the island if there has to be some kind of check outside the island but at the moment so that's kind of conceptually i think accepted by everybody but politically it's currently looking impossible the very small thing but the the dup this unionist party from northern ireland yesterday voted against the government on a relatively harmless bill but it was kind of shot across the bow saying this is what's going to happen if you if you continue with this so really this is going to come to a head in the next two weeks it has to just with the way that time is moving and so either theresa may is going to to to blink and say yeah we accept the european union's proposals on this and risk the wrath of the democratic unionist party and some of the real hardliners in her own party which will create a political crisis in britain or the talks are going to fail you know we're actually getting to a point where a no deal brexit is still possible and it will be the irish question that that will have led to that the irony here is nobody in ireland wants no deal because we're we're collateral damage and all this sort of stuff we you know we don't want to cause britain any harm of any kind we genuinely don't you know i mean even in spite of all the years of bitterness and everything else that's all gone this is there's a mutual interest in having a rational working deal but at the moment it's it's it's politically very difficult to see how that emerges so the conservative uh parties met recently were moving into an eu summit what is theresa may up against both from her own starting with from her own party so um she has two great enemies one is time uh enemy to us all really as you know as you can see with my balding head but um she made a huge tactical mistake i mean just an enormous mistake where where she started the process so the process of leaving the european union is a legal process and the person the country that's leaving starts the clock they they file article 50 it's called they say you know we want to leave and then you've got two years to negotiate there was no need to do this immediately you know it was done very quickly after the brexit vote wouldn't perfectly reasonably say look this is a really complicated thing we've been enmeshed in this for 45 years we're not going to get out of it quickly you know it's a very complicated thing to do but in the euphoria of brexit you know there's all this kind of sense of this is our moment of natural liberation let's do it quickly it's going to be easy it's going to be the easiest trade negotiation in history according to david davis now having started the clock the problem is that the time is just running out you know um and she concentrated entirely on appeasing her own um brexit ultras and then fi they find themselves with with really only a couple of weeks practically speaking to get to a deal so brexit happens the end of march 2019 but the deal has to be ratified by the british parliament by the european parliament and effectively it has to be signed off by every member state of the european union so it's it's a you know getting to a deal is on you know is only one part of it so really if there's not a deal by by the end of november at the very latest december but but you know even that's kind of really pushing it the whole thing collapses and there's no deal so that's one of her enemies the other enemy then is is exactly um the fact that she started out by taking the hardest possible line she wants to be in power and she saw the way to power us the path of least resistance within england which was to go for a really hard brexit this kind of macho we're going out on our own we're going to reestablish a great mercantile trading empire all the countries of the empire just dying to get back into bed with us you know we're the mother country they love us the americans still love us and the australians love us and everybody wants to kind of do deals with us it's all gonna be lovely and easy and therefore we can tell the european union to basically go and stuff it you know go and whistle as as boris johnson said and then you've had this very slow realization of course that um you know it's very simple question geography is destiny britain is an island off the continents of europe and no technology has yet been found to sort of change that right and so it has to have these relationships it has to have these very very close relationships and no work really was done in terms of thinking about how this was going to happen rhetorically they've built up this kind of head of steam for a really hard brexit where so the you have a large group of of backbench mps you have boris johnson of course who's resigned from governments in order to try to lead them thinking that's the way to power and so they're pushing for what they call a canada style deal right which is basically a cannabis i'll deal is just like what the european union would negotiate a trade deal with any other third country with a couple of extras on top now the ludicrous thing about this is that it doesn't address at all the reality of britain's situation britain's not canada you know it's in europe it's trade you know is is 40 percent of its trade is what is already with the european union but also it's tried with the rest of the world remember is done through treaties which have been negotiated via the european union there are 75 major trade treaties so britain in this in this circumstance is starting from scratch to say let's negotiate trade i don't know maybe some people here have been involved in trade deals i haven't but i've spoken to people that are they take a minimum of seven years the canada deal that they're looking for took seven years to negotiate you know because they're incredibly complex i mean you're talking about you know light fittings and standards for you know the most extraordinary goods and services and all sorts of things and um so she's being pushed in this direction she has realized that she has to compromise right so british industry is now saying this is catastrophic i mean we're we're facing a possible catastrophe here so i'm going to someone says but you know for example um the european aerospace industry the only um rival that boeing has in terms of making planes uh is essentially a franco-british creation right so the airbus planes are made in france and actually largely in wales in in in iran cardiff right so every day huge numbers of aircraft parts go from france to cardiff and back every single day you know it's completely integrated supply chains that's just one example nissan builds uh 500 000 cars a year in sunderland which voted for brexit right this working-class town vault for brexit its biggest employer is nissan the japanese car maker nissan brings in and i i had to myself when i saw this figure i thought that's wrong i had to actually go back and check you know but it's actually true they they bring in three million parts a day not not a week a day they bring in three million parts a day they are as all of these big companies are now they are fully integrated supply chains right and it's all just in time nissan has half a day's stores on hand in sunderland half a day after half a day the plant closes down now if you are saying those three million parts have to be checked every day it's just impossible it just cannot be done so the head of nissan um recently came out and said look we didn't say this during the brexit referendum because we didn't think it was going to pass you know we just thought if if we interfere we'll be accused of you know trying to frighten people anything else but i'm really sorry we would just have to close i mean we just cannot you know we just can't do this you know we've invested billions in this we don't want to do this you know this is a state-of-the-art plant it employs enormous numbers of people it really works it's fantastic we're delighted with it but we cannot be having tariff and non-tariff barriers for three million things going in and out every day that's never mind the actual cars that are produced right this is just in terms of process and this is british industry is saying we are facing a catastrophe if there's no deal all of this stuff comes to a halt people are out of work there's an enormous kind of economic hit what are the political consequences of that who knows however what hasn't happened is that nobody including theresa may has built up the political authority to say come on folks get real here you know in these processes every revolution always has you know fantastic utopian ideas it's all going to be great it was those people who were stopping us from being wonderful and as soon as we get rid of those people everything's going to be wonderful that you know that's the basic narrative of a revolution and then somebody has to come along at some stage in napoleon or whatever and say you can't keep doing this you know you know some kind of rationality has to be applied here and the problem is that brexit undermines political authority to such an extent in london that there's now nobody i mean not the government and not the opposition so the labour party which is the alternative government is also completely divided about brexit and is afraid to really say anything very much so what you have is you you have a situation in which there's a real need for pragmatism and for a sort of genuine patriotism of somebody who says look this is self-harm it's not in our interest to continue to try to do this stuff at this level somebody has to come in and say there's going to be all sorts of compromises and you won't like some of them that's what pragmatic life is like and theresa may is the person who's going to have to say that but she hasn't prepared herself to be in that role so so she started taking this very extreme position and over the next two weeks she's going to have to come out and say look would you people ever just shut up you know i i'm really sorry but you can't keep doing this kind of crazy you know nationalist revolution stuff this is people's livelihoods this is the the future of the country this is real stuff with in real people's lives and we have to speak honestly to them and say as your leader i am not going to lead you off a cliff and we don't know yet whether she has the authority to do that you know and this is an extraordinary situation i i can't think of anything we've ever seen like it i don't know if you remember just finally the the brexit movie if you ever go back and want to look at and understand brexit is is the italian job with michael caine and it's absolutely fascinating it's all about going into europe and so kind of a very very strange film but i don't remember where it ends up it ends up with what they steal all the gold from turin the italians and their buses they put it onto a bus and they're getting away they're going you know through the alpine passes and then they take a wrong turn and the bus is left perched over the cliff and it's going like that and the the gold is on one end and all the crew of criminals are on the other end and if they move towards the goals the bus will will will go off and if they don't move towards the goal then the whole thing is pointless and that's exactly where brexit has ended up right so you know they can't move forward to to get this prize that they want and they can't get out of it um it's a really extraordinary situation so is this loss of authority on everyone's part i mean on on all parties part is that the greatest danger yes um and it's it's the problem for us in ireland is it's danger first two of course because you know we we have no say in this we we cannot influence what happens in britain itself um but you know it's it's it's a real lesson to us i think um we all quite rightly you know i'm i'm i'm a professional agitator you know i try to get make people question what how power is being used and how politics is working and those kind of things and it's an absolute democratic duty to do that you know and that's what an engaged democracy is like and i'm not being super serious about people who voted for brexit they they engaged in in a political choice but that has to be balanced by a sense that actually we all depend on political structures that we may criticize and we may dislike but we we cannot destroy those political structures without being very careful as to what takes their place and what kind of institutions might might work for us and the institutions themselves have to have some democratic authority what happened in britain was they used a democratic mechanism that they is not part of their culture referendums if you look at the entire history of of political self-consciousness in england in particular it's about the sovereignty of parliament that's what you know english history is about that and to turn around and one of the most critical existential questions that you've faced in in in your modern history and say actually this is not going to be done by parliament it's going to be done by a popular vote that's fine if you think that through how are we going to follow through on that but they haven't done that so they've placed authority in this sacred moment june 23rd 2016 that moment people spoke but what did the people say you know they said we don't want to be in that thing that's fine but it doesn't really get you very far it doesn't tell you how you're going to do this and and how you're going to do it with with least self-harm i mean in my view it's a crazy decision i i think i i i talked to a guy who was a very old trade union negotiator and he said to me uh a very pro-british guy um and he said you know there are only three possibilities he said if if you're going into a negotiation you know as a labor leader right you say you know what do i want and in this case there were only three possibilities one was the status quo which they had rejected the second was something better than the status quo which the european union could not possibly give a leaving member i mean if if you can leave a club and have all the benefits outside of it then the club is gone right you know and this is literally the european union would would dissolve in in five years if if britain ends up with something better than the status quo by leaving european union's gone so you couldn't get something better than status quo and so the only thing left is something worse than the status quo and who in their right mind would want that but that's effectively what they've what they're stuck with and then you need a political authority to say let's make it the least worse than the status quo it could possibly be let's let's limit the self-harm as much as we possibly can and and so that so that the whole thing doesn't go crazy and maybe down the road we're in a position to to to rethink it um my deep deep worry is that nobody is exerting the moral this the moral imperative actually of standing up and saying you may hate me for this you may think i'm a traitor you may think i'm weak but i love my country and what i love about my country is that it's a rational democratic society which britain is and that in a rational democratic society you have to look at self-harm and say exert your moral authority and say look whatever you think of me the best i can tell you is that we're going to end up with a compromise that you won't like but that will preserve those jobs that will will keep us on some kind of even keel and it will limit the amount of harm that we do to ourselves and to others i i hope that theresa may finds it somewhere in herself to be able to articulate that for the british people and she's going to have to do it over the next few weeks yeah two of the question cards that have come up from audience members asked the question of what would happen were there a second referendum is that wise would that be reckless would those who voted for brexit uh feel betrayed what would be the impact um so a second referendum is often talked about as very undemocratic you know and in one way it's it's it's it's a good argument um i i would suggest it's it's not undemocratic for three reasons one is that if you can't change your mind you don't live in a democracy changing your mind is the essence of democracy if you couldn't change your mind you'd have donald trump here forever secondly um the the 2016 referendum was itself a second referendum this is completely forgotten nobody refers to this it's all in the discourse about this but there was a referendum in 1975 in the uk which was to be the once and for all decision are we in or out and it was passed by 66 to 33 i mean the british voted to be in the european union um so at the very least you could say well best of three perhaps you know but thirdly they're what you know for the reasons we were talking about there was no real content to the question that people were asked it was a pure negative right there was no positive content to it and so it does not seem to me to be at all undemocratic or unreasonable to say okay this is what you voted for this is what it looks like it's a negotiated compromise and this is what it looks like now your question is what would happen and i don't know because it would depend a lot on what the question was is the question here's the compromise do you want this or do you want no deal or is the question here's the compromise you want this or do you want to stay in the european union there are two very different kind of questions so it might even have to be a two-stage referendum believe it or not where you have the three three options on the ballot paper the first time which says take this pretty messy deal go out crash out with no deal or stay in and then a runoff between the top two options right it's a messy process i'm not saying it's it's not to me it's the only way out of this this mess that's been created because exactly as you said in your question you know whatever happens a lot of people are going to feel betrayed you know you can't take this this genie out of the bottle and then just stick it back in they've done it now and and my view is that brexit is always going to be an ex brexit brexit ceased really it died on the day it was born why because it was completely impossible to fulfill in the terms it had been framed it remember it was framed as this is really easy it's no problem we're going to have all the benefits all the existing benefits of european union membership without being in the european union right so that's fine up to the point at which you actually vote to have it and then it just falls apart immediately it's it's it's like you know you know you've seen a film of fellini's roma where they they're digging and they there's beautiful frescoes and they you know they open up they find these things underground and then after filming the air comes into the chamber and the things just disappear you know and it's it's like that it's it's it's it's so it's always in the past oddly enough there was one bright shining moment which was you know between say 5 a.m and 6 a.m on that morning you know when it's it's independent it's all fantastic it's all great anything what have we done i don't know if you remember even looking at the faces maybe you didn't really pay attention here but if you saw boris johnson for example his face on that morning thinking oh god what have we done you see it wasn't supposed to happen this is the key thing for a lot of these people it was a game it was reckless it was an oxford union debate you know me and david cameron we're rivals i'll show him and i'll do this i i happen to know um i haven't had a conversation with with boris johnson's sister and her husband who were with him on the night before he came out to announce which way he was going to go on the referendum they said he changed his mind every hour and if he'd walked out at a different hour you know he would have said britain's future is in europe this is our destiny we don't run away from you know from europe we you know we're going to go in and change europe and the europeans are looking to have us and you know all that he would have done all that stuff he had actually written he's a columnist for the daily telegraph by the way never trust newspaper columns um he had written two columns he had to he had to file his copy and he he wrote two columns one is why we're leaving the european why leaving european union is absolutely crucial to our to our destiny and the other is why staying in your opinion is actually crucial to our destiny that's the level of game playing of recklessness of lack of principle involved in this so for a lot of people were kind of led into this by people like boris johnson johnson was a huge figure i mean if johnson had gone the other way brexit would not have passed there's no question that polling evidence shows this very very strongly so the people who are led into this we're kind of let in on false pretenses you know it's it's a way of kind of making a kind of gesture and having a bit of fun and and sticking our two fingers up to your bloody europeans but it won't really happen it won't have consequences so i think it's reasonable for people to say look okay these are the consequences you can begin to see them now do you want them or not a remarkable thing is that certainly anecdotally but also some of the polling games is something quite a lot of people are saying even if i lose my job i want to do it and we have to remember that national revolutions are like that they stir a certain kind of passion so there's a lot of people who would who would vote again for brexit even knowing the damage it will do and we have to accept that you know we have to accept that i i still think because it was so close and a lot of people thought it would be very gentle you know it'd be just a kind of gesture we'd still be more or less in the european union you know and and a lot of those people i think are saying is this what we voted for so my suspicion would be that it would be something like 55 45 to stay that's what the polls tend to show now but we don't know and and if they vote a second time i think fair enough you know i mean if knowing what it looks like people vote that that's what they want that's an absolute democratic right that people have but i think i think they have a right to make that informed choice rather than the kind of very nebulous upbeat fantasy that they were offered yeah so it sounds like this is the time for theresa may to call her counterpart in ireland to say now how do you structure a good referendum we've done second referendums we we we've done we we had uh twice actually um the irish voted against european union treaties um and then we kind of were a bit chocolate ourselves and thought oh god did we really do that and then and then we kind of negotiated a few like kind of minor changes with europeans and then we voted again and people changed their minds you know and like what's shameful about changing your mind you know i mean buyer's remorse you know i mean how many of us have gone and bought a shirt or a coat or a pair of shoes and said oh god did i really buy that we we make decisions that maybe you know are are not right we don't really think about the consequences and and um i i don't think there's anything at all shameful or humiliating about this but saving face is one of the terrible elements of human conduct generals will send another hundred thousand men to die because they've sent the previous hundred thousand to die and they don't want to lose face by admitting that they were wrong the first time and the british are very proud people you know they really are and and i think all of this could have been solved by the way i think you know i said you shouldn't trust newspaper columnist but if i'd been in charge there was one one thing i would have done free advice to your opinion which is before the brexit vote they should have said we're expelling britain from the european union we don't want you anymore we hate you you're you're terrible people go just get out of here and rich would have said how dare you how bloody dare you tell us that we're leaving we have an absolute right to be in the european union and we won't take it otherwise would have solved holding so how do they say face i again i i have a football is the key to this i think just let them let them win the next world cup and actually they'll be fine so please join me in thanking for no [Applause] tool you

Channel: World Affairs

Views: 369,669

Keywords: World, Affairs, brexit, united kingdom, england, ireland, scotland, wales, trade, european union, europe, germany, theresa may, boris johnson, leadership, parliament, government

Id: JvDAW5SjdaE

Length: 63min 9sec (3789 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 12 2018