Boris Johnson’s talks in Northern Ireland on Wednesday concluded an eventful tour of the UK in which the new prime minister set out his public stance on a number of urgent issues.
The talks in Belfast, which focused on restarting the paralysed Stormont Assembly and reassuring unionists about Brexit and the Irish Backstop, followed appearances in northern England, Scotland, and Wales.
Johnson, who encountered jeering crowds in Edinburgh, Cardiff, and Belfast, nevertheless embarked on the tour riding a 5.5% bounce in the polls for the Conservatives since his appointment, the biggest surge since Tony Blair’s 1997 election, according to The Daily Telegraph.
He used his high-profile trip to meet key representatives of unionist and nationalist movements, and field questions around the economic consequences of his game of no-deal brinkmanship with the EU.
But has he succeeded in shifting anyone’s calculations on Brexit?
Scotland
The new PM is not popular with many Scots, who remember some typically Johnsonian transgressions. “As editor of the Spectator the Uxbridge MP published a poem describing Scottish people as ‘a verminous race who should be placed in ghettos and exterminated’. It went on to describe Scots as ‘tartan dwarves’ who were ‘polluting our stock’”, the Mirror recalls. “More recently he suggested that public money would be better spent in London than Scotland, and proposed tax changes where taxpayers north of the border would subsidise the wealthy in England.”
Johnson was booed as he entered Holyrood in Edinburgh to meet with Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s First Minister and staunch Johnson sceptic, who prior to the meeting had raised concerns about the British government’s Brexit preparations.
After the meeting, a Downing Street spokesperson said: “The prime minister said he was a passionate believer in the power of the union and he would work tirelessly to strengthen the United Kingdom and improve the lives of people right across Scotland.”
Sturgeon, however, reiterated her belief that Brexit is in conflict with the democratic freedoms of her nation, and expressed fears about Brexit without a withdrawal agreement:
“Whatever Boris Johnson might be saying publicly about his preference being to strike a deal, in reality he is really pursuing a no-deal Brexit because that is the logic of the hardline position that he has taken,” she said. “I think that is extremely dangerous for Scotland, indeed for the whole of the UK.”
She continued: “He thinks the EU is going to blink. Having had many tortuous meetings with his predecessor on the issue of Brexit, I think that for a long period of time that’s what she thought as well.”
Speaking to the BBC during a visit to Faslane naval base near Glasgow, Johnson, though, was categorical:
“I don’t want the UK to be aloof or hanging back, I want us to engage, to hold out the hand, to go the extra thousand miles, and what we want to do is make it absolutely clear that the backstop is no good, it’s dead, it’s got to go. The withdrawal agreement is dead, it’s got to go. But there is scope for us to do a new deal.”
Sky News reports that “Johnson also met with Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson while in Scotland. She said she won’t support leaving the EU without an agreement.”
Wales
During his visit to Wales, which unlike Scotland or Northern Ireland voted alongside England to leave the EU, Johnson made what the Evening Standard considers to be a revealing admission that a new deal might not imply an immediate exit from the single market:
“Some of the (no-deal) changes that are going to be necessary in the run-up to 31 October will be crucial anyway if we are going to come out of the customs union and single market, as we must, in the course of the next couple of years.”
Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford aligned himself with Sturgeon over the issue of no-deal Brexit, saying no-deal would be “catastrophic” for the principality.
Mr Johnson was in Wales amid massive anxiety from the Welsh agriculture industry about tariffs following a no-deal Brexit.
Wales is the second largest producer of sheep meat in the world, and exports 40% of what it produces, with the EU its largest buyer. Livestock that cannot be exported in the event of no deal would have to be slaughtered.
Alun Cairns, the secretary of state for Wales, faced a backlash after he suggested exports to Japan following the recently announced trade deal might alleviate the issue.
As the Independent explains: “The five-year deal signed with Japan in January this year envisages around £10m of lamb exports to the country annually, compared to nearly £400m worth of sales to EU27 nations.”
Johnson persisted with his policy of unabashed optimism: “We’ll make sure [farmers] have the support they need. If their markets are going to be tricky, then we will help them to find new markets. We have interventions that are aimed to support their incomes,” he said.
Northern Ireland
In Belfast, Johnson met leaders of the five biggest parties in an attempt to restore the Northern Ireland Assembly.
He said: “I’m pleased to meet each of Northern Ireland’s party leaders today to stress that I am going to do everything in my power to make the ongoing talks to restore devolution a success.”
According to the Telegraph, during a dinner with DUP leader Arlene Foster, and her deputy Nigel Dodds, Johnson told them “he would never be neutral on the Union, but would act in a neutral way in the administration of governance in Northern Ireland.”
The prime minister faced criticism for his intimacy with the DUP, which holds the key to the Government majority in the House of Commons, with critics accusing him of “wining and dining” them, and in so doing showing inappropriate favouritism.
The economic damage to Northern Ireland from a no-deal Brexit is likely to be significant. “Analysis from Stormont’s Department for the Economy showed that a no-deal Brexit could put 40,000 jobs at risk in the region,” reports the Financial Times.
Mirroring Scotland, Brexit, and in particular the prospect of no-deal Brexit, is emboldening seperatist voices in Northern Ireland.
As the Financial Times continues: “Mary Lou McDonald, Sinn Fein president, claimed the route back into the EU for a pro-Remain Northern Ireland would be through a so-called ‘border poll’, uniting the two parts of the island.”
McDonald said that Brexit, and particularly no deal, “represents in anybody’s language a dramatic change of circumstances on this island, and… it would be unthinkable in those circumstances that people would not be given the opportunity to decide on our future together.”
During his tour, Johnson held a widely reported-on phone call with Taoiseach Leo Varadkar of the Republic of Ireland. Both leaders expressed their vehemently-held, mutually exclusive convictions on the issue of the Irish Backstop. Nevertheless, reports the Irish Times “the two leaders agreed on the requirement of maintaining the Belfast Agreement and the restoration of the Northern Assembly and the power-sharing institutions at Stormont.”
The Guardian reports that yesterday, Johnson sent David Frost, “his most senior EU adviser and Brexit negotiator to Brussels to deliver in person his message that the UK will leave without a deal unless the bloc abolishes the Irish backstop.”
According to Conservative MP Daniel Kawczynski “a managed no-deal is not a scenario to fear.” Writing in the Telegraph, he points to the series of “mini deals” already negotiated to soften the blow of leaving the EU with no withdrawal agreement. A return to violence in Northern Ireland is, he says, “simply not the outcome that anyone will allow.”
He endorses Boris’s optimism: “Naturally, there will be short term repercussions, but a Government that believes in Britain and believes in Brexit will be able to take the necessary steps to reduce the short term impacts and bolster the long term successes.”
Writing in The Guardian, the Brexit coordinator for the European parliament, Guy Verhofstadt, reflected on what he considers the Prime Minister’s doomed mission: “Johnson repeatedly declares that Britain must leave the EU ‘do or die’ by 31 October, but he misquotes the Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson:
‘Theirs not to make reply / Theirs not to reason why / Theirs but to do and die. / Into the valley of death / Rode the six hundred.’
‘It is telling that these three words, do or die, misrepresent a poem about a famous British military catastrophe. We must not allow an injurious Brexit strategy, wrongly wrapped up in an English flag, to harm us all.”
