Jonathan Lis assesses the motives of the Government in treating the public, the UK’s democracy, its international partners – everyone outside of itself – with contempt
The UK Government has resolved to violate international law. This is beyond dispute, as a Secretary of State freely and candidly admitted the violation on the floor of the House of Commons. The question, then, is why is this happening and what comes next?
First, let us discount the reasons offered by the Government for pushing the Internal Market Bill and shredding key clauses of the Brexit Withdrawal Treaty.
It is not because the EU is acting in bad faith. It is not because the deal threatens the Union or Britain’s plans for state aid. It is, of course, partly motivated by the need to conceal Brexit’s reality and appease hardline Conservatives and Unionists. But to cling to these reasons is to treat this as old-fashioned politics, defined by pragmatic, legitimate and recognised strategies.
The Government’s politics is many things, but it is not old-fashioned. It is driven by two equally powerful engines in toxic symbiosis: destruction and ego.
Destruction
One of the key ways we misunderstand this Government is to separate its ideology from its tactics. In fact they are the same and destruction is the point.
The many cases in which the Government has destroyed things with contempt carry examples big and small. A small one is the way in which it introduced new restrictions on gatherings, which came into force on Monday.
On Sunday night, the legislation was published on the Government website, with no parliamentary oversight, around 20 minutes before it became law. As of midnight, then, the people of England were conceivably breaking laws they could not possibly have read. Along with the public, this also demonstrated a total contempt for Parliament. Under the UK’s system, the executive proposes laws, which are examined and passed by MPs in Parliament. Under this Government, new curbs on civil liberties, potentially criminalising thousands of people, have today been enacted without seeking our elected representatives’ scrutiny, consent or even consultation.
The most chilling sentence written last week came from a report on the BBC News website: “The Government says Parliament is sovereign and it can pass laws which breach the UK’s international treaty obligations.” As a simple statement of fact, the sentence is unremarkable. As a precedent, it is disturbing beyond contemplation.
Parliament has always been able to legislate for anything. It could legalise genocide if it wanted to. Rarely, however, has anyone felt the need to point this out. The conclusion is not that the Government will break all international law, but that international law no longer constrains it. It not only thinks it can get away with anything – it intends to.
Sure enough, this weekend’s Sunday Telegraph revealed the next inevitable front in the revolution: human rights. The Government, it reported, is planning to opt out of parts of the Human Rights Act, the domestic enforcement mechanism for the European Convention on Human Rights – in place since 1953 and co-drafted by British lawyers. This should surprise nobody because anything which checks the Government’s power or threatens to hold it to account – from judges and civil servants to international treaties – must be defeated or purged. Institutional opposition is to be silenced.
But the contempt of the Boris Johnson administration is almost limitless. Not confined merely to the British public or Parliament, convention and laws, it ultimately extends to anyone who is not them. Including, of course, the people of Ireland.
Exceptionalism
Last week, the Prime Minister seemed strangely anxious about the Irish peace process. The Northern Ireland Protocol, he suggested, must be amended in order to safeguard the Good Friday Agreement.
The Protocol guaranteed an invisible land border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, the alternative being customs posts – which during The Troubles were blown up. Such posts today would not just be a target or provocation, but a visceral reminder of centuries of imperialism, a divided island and a community denied the right to assert its identity. Only the Protocol guaranteed the status quo and that is why the EU, led by Ireland, agreed to it.
This, then, may be stated clearly: on all of the available evidence, the Prime Minister does not know or care about Northern Ireland. For through his actions, he has demonstrated a zealous disregard for Irish lives. Northern Ireland