Important article by Lionel Shriver

[FarriersGirl]

Leading article in the Times today by Lionel Shriver. She has long been a critic of woke but really doesn't pull any punches. In particular she highlights the fact that far from being progressive the era of woke has been the opposite.

www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/ditching-woke-brain-rot-transgender-pronouns-58g8dpxnp

refused to consider smart borders and pre-border checks

You do know that the trade experts said these wouldn’t work to replace a hard border? They’d help a bit but in reality smart borders as they exist now involve physical infrastructure, border guards etc.
Smart borders are not open borders.
The whole idea was straight from fantasy land.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/irish-hard-border-soft-brexit-technology-theresa-may-a8242461.html#

The EU is a delightful organisation if a country cannot leave it at will without having its integral sovereignty abused.
I’m just glad the EU was there to remind the UK government that they had signed an International Peace treaty and to encourage them to fulfill their obligations. Otherwise I think there’s a very high chance they’d have reneged on the GFA and closed a border that they had promised to keep open.

Indeed, smart borders were a fantasy. Any physical infrastructure would have been targeted and destroyed by paramilitaries, reigniting the violent conflict.

The border in Ireland is physically incredibly convoluted. Take the city of Derry, of which most is surrounded on three sides by Donegal. There are places that to drive 10 miles in a straight line would require you to go across the border 4 times.

You simply can't commit the atrocity that is Brexit and then complain that the consequences are an assault on British sovereignty. These consequences were well understood by those of us from the region, but no one gave a fuck at the time. I think even the unionists got a bit of a shock at how little fucks the UK government and British public had for the potential impact on Northern Ireland.

Anyway enough of a derail.

I grew up on the border in N Ireland and I can tell you from personal experience that there are so many fields and roads (and even some houses) that have the border running through them that people could easily use these to cross rather than any official checkpoints. It's always been that way ever since Northern Ireland was created and the island was partitioned. The border has been taken advantage of, and ignored, by terrorists and smugglers and locals for both practical and political reasons.

Even during the Troubles, when the British army and HMRC tried to lock it down as tightly as could be managed by declaring checkpoints to be the only official ways to cross and that minor roads were unapproved, and in some cases blown up to make crossing difficult, the locals ignored it and even filled in the bomb craters to make the roads passable again. Huge numbers of people and livestock living in the area (as well as goods, tourists, workers, and people from other parts of the island) have crossed over it countless times every day for decades.

New rules since Brexit have made it irritating in ways small and big so that, for example, people living on the border now need two mobile phone contracts (one for UK and one for ROI) because mobile phone signals ignore borders and you could be living in NI but only be able to get ROI phone signal which would cost a small fortune in roaming charges if you didn't have an additional ROI or UK mobile contract. Trying to send gifts and post to family members on the other side of the border has become a pain in the arse with new customs regulations. There's been an increase in cultural tensions for people who live on the border because being in the EU helped to mitigate the fact (for Nationalists) that Ireland was partitioned and that NI was in the UK - with both states being in the EU the border issue could be ignored and Ireland didn't feel as partitioned as it had been. Now, for some people the changes arising from the UK leaving the EU have brought the spectre of violent disagreements about partition back into the worries of daily life and have upset decades of cross community peace building.

The best (and easiest) system for everybody in Ireland was the open border that came with being in the EU - it made life easiest for everyone living on, and working across, the border itself and for those with family on the other side of the border. It was great for businesses large and small as it made it easier for say a dairy company to buy milk from farmers on both sides of the border on a daily basis and combine it into products that were sold all over the island. It helped to diffuse sectarian tension over partition and it improved the economy of border areas which, pre-EU, had been hugely disadvantaged economically. For the majority of people living in communities on the border in Ireland, partition of the island is viewed as being an imposition by the British State and the Common Travel Area didn't achieve much in the way of positives for the people living on the border. It was both ROI and UK being in the EU that paved the way for the daily improvements in quality of life and political sentiment. Now the new rules introduced post Brexit bring frictions back into daily life for people and it's difficult as well as unpleasant to be going backwards in this way. And I wish all of these things, and more, had been taken seriously by successive British governments during the Brexit referendum and negotiations.

I agree with @TheStarfire , We Need To Talk About Kevin is written from an ungenerous place.
Surely it's not feminism to only be able to say, "You go girl!!" in response to anything a woman writes?
I find Martin Amis a bit wanky, I think Will Self is incredibly narcisstic (a case of nominitive determinism?), Christopher Hitchens and Jeremby Paxman could both be pompous bores.
I'm not going to go easy on Shriver just because she's a delicate lady.

But open borders between EU countries only date back to the 90s?
I agree sending goods and also gifts to the RoI is a pain - I have family living in Co. Kerry. But the problem is of the EU's making. Perhaps the solution is for the RoI to leave the EU too? After Brussels changes rules on tax breaks currently used by RoI to get companies such as Amazon to invest, they might want to.

I remember well that the RoI voted against the Lisbon Treaty and were threatened with de-investment by Brussels if they did not change their mind. The Irish, like the Portuguese, Spanish, Italians and Greeks, have been 'othered' by Brussels which sees true 'Europe' being northern Europe (which was why the UK leaving was such an issue - as well as the huge loss of money to the EU).

I love that article. She is so right about the wokesters being conformists. It just takes a few people to actually stand up for the truth and we get a critical mass fairly easily

Absolutely agree. Her article is light hearted and poking fun at woke authoritarians. It's not at all racist or sexist to criticize tokenistic DEI initiatives. I have heard her interviewed on podcasts and she strikes me as open minded and honest. She openly stated she didn't know who she would vote for in the us elections and discussed both parties flaws. She isn't into censorship or cancel culture but that doesn't make her some sort of crazed bigot.

Sadly people who can see the flaws in following trans wokism like a region don't seem to be able to see it elsewhere

Perhaps the solution is for the RoI to leave the EU too?

With all due respect and in the most restrained possible terms, don't be so fucking ridiculous.

Yeah right Lionel 😂

Indeed. It us up to ppl in Northern Ireland to decide their political arrangements. As per the Good Friday Agreement - which includes an open border. The Brexiters think closing the border is no big deal. Johnson says the GFA is just a footnote in history. Nobody in the EU is saying this stuff. Nobody in the EU has to tell people in Northern Ireland or the Republic how important the GFA is. But they are aware of its importance. The Tories and Reform are not. That is not the fault of anyone in Belfast , Dublin or Brussels. It is all on politicians like Michael ' the Good Friday Agreement is treason ' Gove and others of his ilk.

And English man and Irish man and a Scots man walked into a bar. But they all had to leave because the English man didn't like it in there.
Seriously though I've had English people living here tell me we'll have to leave - ' it's just common sense now we've left ' etc etc...

I don't think the GFA is treason. I do think the arrangements that put a border between England, Scotland and Wales and NI, running across the Irish Sea, is treason.

But open borders between EU countries only date back to the 90s?

And so does the Northern Irish peace process - the two things are intimately linked. The open border reduced political tensions around the issue of partition.

Perhaps the solution is for the RoI to leave the EU too?

If you had lived through the amazing improvements in infrastructure and trading and daily life that membership of the EU brought to Ireland, as well as giving the country a larger voice in international affairs, you would understand why there is a largely favourable view of the EU in Ireland. If the IMF/EU’s Troika determinations on Ireland’s economic bailout post the 2008 crash couldn’t piss the Irish off enough to want to leave the EU, then the post-Brexit set up doesn’t seem likely to do it either.

Ireland’s history with Britain means that a lot of our political decisions are framed through that history and Ireland feels it has has more of a voice, and feels less threatened, by being in the EU rather than dealing with the ramifications of UK political decisions on its own. Brexit negotiations proved that to Ireland, in that the UK was dismissive of Irish concerns whereas the EU took them seriously and made them central to the negotiations.

Irish people don’t always like the EU but they have a more positive history of association with the EU than they do with the UK.

Lionel Shriver doesn’t seem to be aware of, or take into consideration the feelings of, both sides of the community in Northern Ireland or of the people on both sides of the border. Her view is reminiscent of the UK Brexit negotiators in that way.

The sea was always a sort of border though? And as a Unionist business man put it ' The Scots would kill to be in our situation '. Indeed , as Sunak observed ' the only place on earth able to trade freely with both Britain and the EU'.
Thus inadvertently letting the cat out of the bag - since this position is so enviable why is it denied to the rest of the UK? But that ship has sailed. Or sunk. Or whatever

The Irish Sea was a border in so many ways, particularly citizens' rights. Abortion law - never brought into line with GB. Male same sex activity - illegal until 1982 (despite vulnerable boys in the Kincora Home being used as a sexual reward for UK allies - with the side benefit to the UK of making the abusers vulnerable to blackmail). Intermittent court rulings obliging some UK citizens to live in NI rather than GB. Internment without trial of citizens (and the use of torture). Armed militias patrolling country roads. Armed police.

There were always phytosanitary and animal health checks at the ports, which were stepped up in cases of emergency, notably during the Foot and Mouth outbreak in 2001, when animal trade over the Irish sea into NI was stopped overnight.

The sudden flurry of outrage at NI being forced by the wicked EU to have a better economic outlook than GB is hilarious.

Several nations are scattered over islands, and some nations share the same island, so the sea is not an obvious border. One example is Scotland, with a mainland and several island groups making up the same country. Shetlanders, I suspect, would not share the view of a Scot - chances are should Scotland ever leave the UK, then Shetland (and its oil/renewable energy sources) will leave Scotland.

Does Shetland have the same laws and legal system as Scotland?