One of the
features of the greatest religious schisms of the past is that they often seemed
to revolve around what look, to the outsider, like relatively petty differences
of doctrine, but they consumed absolutely those involved in them. Today’s Great Brexit Debate within the UK
cabinet bears more than a passing resemblance.
We are told
that they are today debating between two options, neither of which solves the
Irish border problem, and neither of which is going to be acceptable to the
EU27, but both of which are presented with increasing zeal by their respective supporters.
Brexiteers of
both denominations are trying to pretend that finding the best method of making
it easy to cross a hard border with the Republic is in every sense the same
thing as not having a hard border at all.
I’m not sure whether this redefinition of ‘same’ from what it used to
mean when I was young owes more to George Orwell and newspeak, or Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty. I’d like to think that it was some clever
form of satire, but it is becoming increasingly obvious that they really do not
understand that ‘no border’ and ‘easy border to cross’ are not at all the same
thing, and that no amount of mangling the language can make them the same.
After months of
trying to avoid coming up with a firm proposal on anything, during which they have been kicking the tin
down the road and pretending that that amounts to agreement, things are finally
coming to a head. Brexit has become a
religion, with fervour replacing logic and one set of true believers denouncing
their own government as heretics or worse.
In the process, the Conservative Party’s MPs and Ministers are engaging
in a very public and utterly pointless row about which of two unworkable
alternatives they will ultimately ask the EU27 to formally reject. Can someone please remind me again: precisely
how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
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