Divide and conquer is one of those old rules or strategies which has an uncanny habit of working in many ways. It is most successful when the parties subjected to it are so entrenched with their own priorities, they remain blissfully unaware of what is happening.
In the past 24 hours, the ridiculous nature of the so-called negotiations between our Government and the EU over Brexit have finally reached a stage where some of the more sinister aims of the European Union have been outed.
Incompetent and as duplicitous as Theresa May and her Team have been, the lack of understanding of the EU and its modus operandi has been ignored, or at best misunderstood. Not only by those who voted Remain. But also by many Leavers who with the British spirit of fair play, have believed that those in a so-called forty-year relationship with us would treat us exactly the same.
We have all been misguided to believe that the EU would be reasonable over negotiations which would always have been easy to secure benefits that specifically went their way.
If a clearer message was ever needed to spell out just how dangerous the EU really is, it must surely be the demand for a ‘backstop’ set against a ‘backstop’ for Northern Ireland.
We should be under no illusion that this would be an agreement that once confirmed would almost certainly guarantee the break up of the United Kingdom, rather than keeping it as England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, as it now is.
Whilst painted as a ‘backstop’, neither of the two forms of this misnamed safety net or facilitation device is what is appears to be.
The EU has a time-served history of using and abusing anything or any term that it manages to insert within Agreements.
Its deviousness is always anchored within the deliberate ambiguity of terms which it uses. It always uses language differences and what deliberately appear to be basic issues of interpretation to do all the painful work for them. Meanwhile painting themselves as having always been very reasonable and committed to some high-flung community-cased ideal.
It’s all hokum. The EU knows that the most effective way to build its own idea of a union, is to break down the constituent parts of member Countries, into Regions or by placing emphasis on publicly identifiable regional areas appearing to give them a sense of their own identity, destiny and self-determination.
They do so whilst removing any of the tools which would allow any of these Regionas to actually achieve such seemingly reasonable aims, whilst directing true power even further away to Brussels, where the futures of every ‘European Citizen’ will be decided by autocrats. A technically non-reversible process by design, where true democracy will become all but a memory, and very quickly left behind.
Yes, I agree that a statement like that doesn’t sound right. And to many it doesn’t.
But many will also remember the push for the development of multiple UK Regions, which included the processes of Devolution for Scotland and Wales, and what without a struggle on the part of many would have seen England also carved up to resemble the European Parliamentary Constituencies – a victory that we should all at some point be grateful that the EU was denied.
Devolution itself was not the great giveaway to the people or an act of political generosity on the part of Tony Blair as he and his Government then wanted us all to think.
It was the price that an overly ambitious and self-serving Prime Minister was prepared to pay as he attempted to curry favor with the hierarchy of the EU.
It was an act completely devoid of either foresight or concern for the consequences of what in terms of our National Union, the process of Devolution had the potential to do.
Devolution and Regionalisation, sold through the dubious lens of devolving power and of creating ‘localism’ as Cameron painted it, was never what any of these white elephants of governance were really about.
They are nothing more than dubious tools to create a pyrrhic connection and public misconception of close interaction with a federated structure of government. A patsy sub-decision making governmental structure, free from the ability to conduct any meaningful form of decision making at National level – the consequences of which I shall leave for you to ponder.
Where Blair and the last Labour Government failed as the EU’s stooges, May’s intransigence has brought us critically close to allowing the EU to achieve what the Brexit Vote should have in one moment permanently denied.
If in the process of ‘delivering’ an agreement over Brexit with the EU in the coming days Theresa May finds a way to leave any question remaining over the integrity of Northern Ireland’s relationship with the rest of our Country, rest assured that it will be our very identity as a Nation – not just the Conservative Party which will be well and truly screwed.
Adam Tugwell 