COMMENT
Tory MPs should eat their sausage on a stick, and prepare for an electoral wipeout
Brexit is ruined. Our borders remain wide open. Fear of crime is growing. The cost of living hurts. Taxes are too high. And on the list goes
NIGEL FARAGE28 February 2023 • 11:48am
The threats have all but disappeared. There will be no ministerial resignations, no massed ranks of furious Tory Eurosceptics, and the Boris Johnson comeback train has almost certainly been derailed. There is so much to celebrate. Just think – trade in sausages is now legal between one part of the United Kingdom and another! I do hope that the Conservative and Unionist Party enjoys its brief moment of unified joy in victory courtesy of the Windsor Framework because, I promise you, it will not last long.
First, let’s look at the positive things. In his speech to the House of Commons, Rishi Sunak spared no criticism of the day-to-day depredations to trade in everything from seed potatoes to – you guessed it – sausages, which have been endured in Northern Ireland for the last seven years. Now, Sunak declared, such disruptions are behind us. In making an appalling trade situation significantly better, there is no doubt that good progress has been made.
Equally, by winning a concession on VAT rules and excise duties, success must also be acknowledged. I’m not sure that Ursula von der Leyen, the EU Commission president, will be too worried about this, though. She knows full well that the Conservative government has no intention of reducing taxes or becoming more competitive. She will also be aware that in about 18 months’ time, Britain will be run by a deeply Europhile Labour administration which will simply copy and paste every single regulation produced by the EU and apply it not just in Northern Ireland, but throughout the UK.
Perhaps the most ironic segment of the Prime Minister’s Commons speech was when he showered praise upon “my predecessors for laying the groundwork” for the agreement. If Sunak was referring to Boris Johnson and Theresa May, even he must have struggled to say those words with a straight face. It was, of course, May who swallowed the bitter Barnier pill that was the Northern Ireland Protocol; and it was Johnson who wilfully plunged the province into a different constitutional status while promising the very opposite. Neither could be called a success.
The key to any real definition of success is the legal basis behind this framework. If Sunak has truly won the right to veto EU single market laws introduced into Northern Ireland, he would have secured a significant – perhaps even historic – coup. Yet when asked a direct question at his press conference in Windsor on Monday about the continued supremacy of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), he obfuscated. In contrast, von der Leyen was clear and instinctive. She said that the ECJ will be the “sole and final arbiter of EU law”. In practice, this means that the attempt to remove the UK from the ECJ’s clutches and instead appoint an independent panel to oversee disputes was rejected. As I learned at the time of Boris Johnson’s “oven ready” deal in Brussels in 2019, inconvenient legal facts aren’t always able to get in the way of a good political story.
Senior Conservative figures are declaring the Windsor Framework to be a triumph and, by extension, a turning point in the party’s fortunes. Even Boris Johnson appears to have gone to ground, suggesting that any backbench rebellion inspired by him is unlikely. Sunak will be allowed to claim “I got Brexit done”. All well and good.
In the real world, however, few voters know or care anything about the intricacies of the Northern Irish Protocol. All they see is a government in its 13th year that is spluttering onwards devoid of fresh ideas and even more detached from most people’s problems than it was before the Brexit vote in 2016. Our borders remain wide open to boatloads of illegal immigrants. Fear of crime in cities is growing. The cost of living hurts. Taxes are too high. Bureaucracy is strangling enterprise. And on the list goes.
What is the Conservative Party for? What does it believe in? Is it really any different to the Labour Party? These questions are now being asked so frequently and so widely that many – perhaps most – Tory MPs have privately given up hope of the party remaining in power beyond next year. And they’d be right.
My advice to them is to revel in this moment while it lasts, eat their sausage on a stick, and prepare for an electoral wipeout.
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