Niall Ferguson: belief

Transcript context

…What’s going to happen in Northern Ireland? And how do you, as a Scot, maybe understand that situation differently? In order to become prime minister, Boris Johnson — who is the Disraeli of our time, not the Churchill — realized that he had to agree to something that was completely unworkable, the Northern Ireland Protocol. For listeners, viewers uninterested in all this, I’ll try to keep it simple. Ultimately, if you took the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland — which is the full name of this country where I currently sit — out of the European Union, you have to have a border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. That’s not something that the Good Friday Agreement smiles upon. You had to kind of agree not to do that. That implied, of course, that you’d have your customs border in the Irish Sea and that Northern Ireland would functionally be treated in the same way as the rest of Ireland, as the Republic of Ireland, in trade at least. This, of course, when you think about it for a split second, is a terrible blow to Unionism in Ulster, Northern Ireland, and a great win for the proponents of Irish reunification. But Boris doesn’t care about that. Like most people who’ve grown up in English politics, he has only the haziest notions about Northern Ireland. From his point of view, the goal was to get to the top of the greasy pole. If that meant agreeing to something unworkable, then so be it. That worked out well for him, and it continues to work well because Brexit is not an end state. It’s an ongoing, probably interminable, process, which helps the conservatives in England, particularly with the working class. What happens in Northern Ireland? Well, I was told just the other day that the Troubles would return because of these issues. I think that’s bluff. I don’t think there really are that many people north or south of the Irish border who want to go back to the bad old days. I think there’s a lot of bluff there, and the media like to hype it up, but I don’t think we’ll go back to the Troubles over this issue. Fifty years from now, will there be one Ireland?…

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