Good one from Fintan O'Toole:-https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/15/britain-ni-protocol-brexit-ministers-deal#comment-157003568"Ministers are portraying themselves as victims of a deal they created for Northern Ireland. A classic blame-shifting strategy"Johnson "certainly did not win an election on the basis that this text was his magic formula that allowed him to get Brexit done. If you think you remember such things, you must be mad. In the pseudo-reality now being conjured, it is the EU that forced this horrible deal on a defenceless Britain. Self-pity has always been the dominant emotion in Brexit, and it has shaped the story the Brexiters are now telling themselves about the protocol.Lord Frost, who led the British side in the talks, now claims that “My negotiating team was treated brutally as the supplicant representatives of a renegade province.” The UK “was not a fully sovereign power when we negotiated” the protocol. The protocol was thus “essentially imposed under duress” – which makes it neither legally nor morally binding.This masochistic fantasy was never revealed to parliament or to the electorate – “sign up to the EU’s brutal diktat” was not likely to be a vote winner. But it is the narrative that underlies the new bill. Only by rewriting the very recent past as misery lit, with poor little Britain as the victim of abuse by the dastardly foreigner, can Johnson’s direct responsibility for the protocol be occluded.""Imposed under duress"!
David Ainsworth ● 1329d