And Now ‘Brino’: Brexit In, Alas, Name Only By Stephen MacLean
https://www.nysun.com/foreign/and-now-brino-brexit-in-alas-name-only/91336/
News from Downing Street tonight — that prime ministerial chief adviser Dominic Cummings has left Downing Street — alarms friends of British liberty.
Mr. Cummings was the dynamo behind the “Vote Leave” campaign that saw Brexit triumph at the 2016 referendum. His indispensability is right up there with that of Nigel Farage of the United Kingdom Independence Party.
When he joined Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s team at No 10, Brexiteers took heart that not only was a friend of independence advising the premier, but an avowed enemy of the bureaucratic “deep state.” Expectations were high.
Then coronavirus struck Britain. Mr. Cummings, far from being a courageous voice of common sense, was instead credited with Mr. Johnson’s credulous concessions to a scientific community only too willing to assume responsibility for shuttering Britain’s economy.
Reports are that with Mr. Cummings’s departure go the “Vote Leave” coterie he brought with him into Downing Street. Their duties are to be assumed by allies of the prime minister’s left-liberal fiancée, Carrie Symonds, who has had tense relations with the tattered remnant of right-leaning policy wonks.
To Miss Symonds is accredited blame for Boris’s embrace of environmental extremism, such as the pledge to make Britain carbon neutral by 2050 — a recipe for reducing economic prosperity. As such, questions of climate and coronavirus only added insult to injury with the Government’s far-reaching interventionist agenda.
Now, with the loss of putative pushback the Cummings contingent provided, fears are that the Prime Minister’s statist inclinations will be unimpeded. Already it is rumored that the Government will be less combative against the predominantly progressive press, principally the BBC. Gone too will be the fight, however half-hearted, for the integrity of Britain’s cultural history.
Instead, Britain will see a more moderate ministry in office. Critics see this as code for endorsing a second referendum for independence in Scotland. Cummings’s departure, meantime, is the second blow to Brexiteers in as many weeks. If the putative win for the Biden-Harris ticket in America is confirmed, the cause of British independence from the EU has lost, in President Trump, a friend.
Mr. Biden is a Brexit adversary, voicing his pro-EU sentiments during the referendum four years ago. He repeated his hostility when the Conservative government initiated legislation to block those features of the Withdrawal Agreement that it argued would impede commerce with Northern Ireland.
Mr. Biden and Europhiles countered that such steps would jeopardize the Good Friday Agreement. He doubled down on his belligerence when he refused to respond to questions from the BBC post-election, pleading his “Irishness” for his implacability.
Prime Minister Johnson knows that a Biden administration would make EU concessions a prerequisite for American amity, and the Prime Minister will be under pressure to oblige. Brussels, likewise, knows that the rise of Mr. Biden puts Britain over a barrel.
The EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, tweeted that three keys alone stood between a successful UK-EU trade deal: “effective governance and enforcement mechanisms”; trade and competition founded on “shared high standards”; and “stable and reciprocal access to markets and fishing opportunities.”
This bureaucratic blather can be deciphered as meaning adjudication of disputes by the European Court of Justice; a level playing field with respect to regulations, tax policy, and state subsidies; and allowing the EU to continue taking upwards of 60% of the catch in UK waters.
Thus we have “Brino”: Brexit in name only.
While America waits to see who is the rightful occupant of the White House, Brexiteers anxiously anticipate what fancies Boris Johnson’s fiancée will foist upon him next. Dare one expect any resistance from the Tory backbench?
It reminds your correspondent of Benjamin Disraeli, castigating the party for its betrayal of the agricultural interest during the Anti-Corn Law debates by calling the Conservative Government an “organized hypocrisy.”
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