Brexit - the Final Countdown

The Brits, half of them anyway, are looking forward to midnight and Britain's official departure from the European Union. The Euros, on a different time zone, will mark the event at 11 p.m., London time.

Festivities? There are bound to be some. CBC was reporting this morning that in Scotland they're marking the day by flying the EU flag. They don't see much to celebrate in being forced to leave the European Union against their will. Hmm, that may have repercussions down the road.

Then there's Northern Ireland. Ouch.

The Irish border was a sticking point during negotiations for the withdrawal agreement. There were concerns a hard land border on the island of Ireland could lead to cumbersome lineups, political unrest or even a return to violence.

Instead British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's deal puts the border on the Irish Sea, essentially a border inside the U.K., where goods going between Great Britain and Northern Ireland will be subject to checks.

It would give the EU control over what is making it into the Northern Island and possibly down to the Republic.

"What we are going to be concerned about is what rules and regulations will be put in place," said Seamus Leheny, policy manager for the Freight Transport Association. "Worst-case scenarios if the system isn't robust and efficient, you can have a backlog of goods."

The process will remain as it is now during the 11-month transition period but eventually there will likely be new checks and paperwork required at ports in Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Meanwhile, Sinn Fein is demanding a referendum on uniting the North with the Republic.

A poll on Irish unity was not an “exotic red line” for Sinn Féin entering coalition government but “an absolute necessity” after Brexit, said the party’s president Mary Lou McDonald. 

Speaking at a protest against Brexit on the Irish Border on the day the UK leaves the EU, the Sinn Féin leader said “preparations for constitutional change” on the island “needed to start.” 

The party, in third place in the polls closely behind Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, has made a Border poll within five years a condition of entering a government after the February 8th election.

It's perfect tinder for the hot heads who might spark a return of The Troubles. BoJo some time ago hinted that he'd accept losing Northern Ireland if that was necessitated by Brexit.

Citizens of the Republic have a date with destiny next week when they go to the polls to choose a new government. The Guardian reports that recent polls show a surge in support for Sinn Fein among younger voters.

It is fitting that the final word go to Irish Times/Guardian columnist, Fintan O'Toole, who penned Britain's obituary a few days ago.

During the referendum campaign in 2016, Johnson puzzled many of his own supporters by claiming Brexit itself as, of all things, “the great project of European liberalism”. This may be like claiming puritanism as the great project of sexual liberation, but it does make a superficial kind of sense. The central idea of Brexit is indeed part of 18th- and 19th-century European culture: the nation state as the primary locus of political loyalty and as the collective manifestation of a unified “people”. Brexit has to present itself in these terms: a suppressed people rising up, as Jacob Rees-Mogg puts it, to set itself “free of the heavy yoke of the European Union”.

But here there is a great irony: Britain is not and never has been a nation state. For most of its history as a state, it has been at the heart not of a national polity, but of a vast multinational and polyglot empire. And the UK is itself a four-nation amalgam of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. There is no single pre-EU UK “nation” to return to. There is no unified “people” to whom power is being returned. And this is the contradiction that the Brexit project cannot even acknowledge, let alone resolve.

Scotland and Northern Ireland rejected Brexit even more emphatically in the general election of 2019 than they had done in the referendum of 2016 and a clear majority of voters in the UK as a whole voted in 2019 for parties that promised a second referendum and an opportunity to stay in the EU. So while Johnson likes to talk of 31 January as “this pivotal moment in our national story”, there is neither a settled nation nor a shared story. Brexit is not Northern Ireland’s story. It is not Scotland’s story. It is not even London’s story. It is the national origin myth of the place that Anthony Barnett, co-founder of openDemocracy, calls “England without London”. 

There is no doubt that Brexit has worked in the way that nationalist movements try to – it has united people across great divides of social class and geography in the name of a transcendent identity. Many of those people, if not quite drunk on scrumpy and bawling Brexit shanties, will feel real joy on 31 January. But the problem is that this unity of national purpose functions within a nation that does not actually exist: non-metropolitan England and parts of English-speaking Wales. And it is purchased at the very high price of creating much deeper divisions between England-without-London and the rest of the British-Irish archipelago. 

There is a particular paradox here when we think back on that great Brexit slogan: take back control. It is that the parts of the UK that have actually “taken back control” into their own local democratic institutions reject Brexit; while the parts that support Brexit have no such institutions. The Scottish parliament, the Welsh Senedd and the Northern Ireland assembly have all voted overwhelmingly in recent weeks to reject the withdrawal agreement. (Their votes will of course be ignored by the government in London.)