Insult and bad faith

Yesterday, David "Lord" Frost, made a speech on the future of the NIP.

In the seech, he managed, deliberatly, to insult the EU and the US, time and time again. Which might not be the wisest of moves.

At no point did he, as the person who negotiated and agreed the WA and NIP, took any blame for the mess and crisis he sees.

It's all someone else's fault.

The EU's.

Either, the UK, under his negotiation and JOhnson's direction, didn't understand what they were agreeing to, or they never had the intention of honouring it.

Although it would be "funny" to think it was the former, it is almost certainly the latter.

A dictionary definition of bad faith. Bad faith in an international treaty entered into freely.

Bad faith in taking the country to the polls on the back of pretty much the only policy, and getting elected to implement a deal with the EU they never intended to honour.

Getting Parliament to ratify said deal, a deal the Government always intended to break.

The deal, the WA and NIP, threw to the Loyalist side of NI politics and life under a bus.

Aganst the Sewell Convention, the UK Government failed to get approval of the NI or any devolved institions. Johnson's Brexit was forced on a country that had voted to remain.

The above is not an opion, but facts.

Now the Government, not wanting to reap this bitter harvest, tries to wriggle out of what it signed up to. Mainly because it is damaging NI, but rather the NIP is realigning the NI economy away from one with the rest of Britain but with the Republic to the south.

The EU trusted the UK Government to police one of it's regulatory borders, and now the UK wants to renege on that. The UK agreed that the UK sinle market would be broen, with a regulatory border in the Irish Sea, this was true from November 2019 when the NIP was agreed and also agreed on how it would work.

THis has not changed.

As I have always said, once May defined Brexit as leaving the EU SM and CU, it was a quiestion of where the UK wanted the regulatory border: across Ireland or in the Irish Sea. The latter was the least bad option. But still bad, with huge political costs.


Which Johnson and Frost no longer want to pay.

The choice is either to accept the NIP as it is, with tinkering around the edges, of the rest of Britain joining NI partly in the EU SM.