Last week, the Queen agreed to Boris Johnson’s motion to suspend (prorogue) parliament days after it is due to return this week. The closure is expected to be for around five weeks, which means that the time for politicians to push through legislation to stop a no-deal Brexit before parliament is suspended is severely limited. The return of parliamentary business after the prorogation is proposed for 14 October – dangerously close to the date of Britain’s proposed departure from the EU on the 31st.
Protests have taken place across Britain against what is seen as an anti-democratic move (#DefendOurDemocracy; #StopTheCoup). Crowds in London and other cities including Bristol, Birmingham, Sheffield, Manchester, Swansea, Liverpool and Belfast chanted lines such as ‘Stop the Coup’, ‘Boris, Boris, Boris – out, out, out’ and ‘Bollocks to Brexit’. Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell called Boris Johnson a ‘dictator’, adding that the suspension of Parliament had ‘rightfully’ been called ‘a very British coup’.
In Belfast, protesters underlined their further lack of political representation in Northern Ireland in the context of the collapse of the devolved power-sharing executive and assembly in Stormont in 2017. The Northern Irish Assembly was established as a condition of the Good Friday Agreement (or Belfast Agreement) of 10 April 1998. The Assembly was set up as a structure for the DUP and Sinn Féin to work together in a mandatory coalition in which nationalist and unionist parties share power. The coalition dissolved when Martin McGuinness resigned as deputy first minister over the DUP’s handling of certain policies, which meant that DUP leader Arlene Foster lost her job as first minister, triggering the collapse of the Assembly. Brenda Gough, an activist who helped promote the Belfast protest on Saturday, is reported in the Belfast Telegraph as saying: ‘A lot of people don’t seem to understand that politicians work for us, they are there to represent our voices, and we understand what it is like not to have that in Northern Ireland because obviously Stormont has been shut down for two-and-a-half years’. She added: ‘The fact that democracy has now been removed from our society is exceptionally sinister’.
Raymond McCord, a victims’ campaigner in Northern Ireland whose son was murdered by loyalist paramilitaries in 1997, is launching a legal bid in Belfast to reverse Boris Johnson’s advice to the Queen to suspend Parliament. This injunction is being pursued in advance of judicial review proceedings against the Government to stop a no-deal Brexit, which McCord claims would damage the Irish peace process. On Boris Johnson, he is quoted by the Belfast Telegraph as saying: ‘This is a Prime Minister who will do anything to get his own way without concerns for the people of Northern Ireland and the peace process.’ Judges will decide today whether the injunction case will be heard later this week. The full hearing is currently set for 16 September.
In yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph, the European Commission’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier is unequivocal about the EU’s commitment to the Irish backstop, deal or no deal: ‘In case of no deal, all the UK’s financial and other obligations from its past EU membership will continue to exist, as well as obviously the international obligations it has to protect the Good Friday Agreement, in all its dimensions.’
Tuesday 3 September, 2019: I’m sitting in my hotel room in Belfast watching BBC news. It’s just gone nine in the evening, and there is still a raucous crowd of protestors blocking streets outside Westminister as MPs debate the possibility of pushing forward legislation to prevent a no-deal Brexit. More than 20 Tory rebels are being threatened with de-selection if they don’t vote with Boris Johnson’s government on the bill – these include Winston Churchill’s grandson Sir Nicholas Soames, former chancellor Phillip Hammond and long-standing Tory MP and former Chancellor of the Exchequer Ken Clarke. Depressed, frazzled and fractious MPs are firing potshots at each other across the House. It’s all very complicated.
Earlier in the day, former conservative member Philip Lee defected to the Liberal Democrat party. Midway through Boris Johnson’s speech, Lee crossed the floor of the chamber to the Lib Dem benches, leaving Johnson without a Commons majority. The Guardianquotes a statement from Lee that says ‘he had departed due to the way Johnson was pursuing a “damaging Brexit” that could “put lives at risk.” ‘
A snap general election on Monday 14 October may be called if the bill goes ahead to take a no-deal Brexit off the negotiating table – that is, if the Tory ‘Brexit Rebel Alliance’, Labour MPs, Lib Dems and others in support of the anti-no-deal motion take control of the Commons. Johnson needs a two-thirds Commons majority to call a general election.
It’s almost 10pm and the first vote is to allow MPs to take control of House of Commons’ business tomorrow in order to push through legislation to stop a no-deal Brexit and to delay the leaving date for another three months… those in favour seem confident…
There is a delay in the ‘Aye’ voting lobby due to overcrowding.
The vote is in at 22:13 – (Aye) 328-301 (No). The Ayes have it! The vote was in response to the question: Can MPs take control of Commons business? Boris is blustering… and tabling a motion to call an election. But Corbyn wants the no-deal-Brexit legislation to go through first… lots of baying and bellowing from the Tories. Boris is acting like a petulant school boy who’s not allowed a lollipop. But the defeat is decisive and no-one is very reassured by Boris’s witterings (or ‘Pifflepafflewifflewaffle’, as John Crace describes it) in which he tries to assure the house that he’s working towards a deal but he insists that he needs ‘no deal’ as part of his negotiating hand. He dubs the motion, put forward by backbencher Hilary Benn, ‘Jeremy Corbyn’s surrender bill’.
And all 21 Tory rebels are being expelled from the party.
Wednesday 4 September, 2019: The Benn bill passes in the House of Commons, and the prime minister’s attempt to force a general election on 15 October is thwarted – opposition parties defy Boris Johnson because they want to wait till the no-deal legislation passes into law before they agree to the snap election.
Following the series of defeats in the Commons – the first time a prime minister has lost his/her first parliament vote since 1894 – Johnson and his cronies resort to outrageous bullying tactics and schoolboy name-calling. Following the prime-minister’s lead, Brexiteer Andrea Jenkyns accuses Jeremy Corbyn of ‘chickening out’ of going to the polls on 15 October on BBC’s Newsnight. During PMQs on Wednesday 4 September, Johnson calls Corbyn a ‘chlorinated chicken‘ and (apparently) a ‘great big girl’s blouse‘ for not agreeing to the snap election and repeatedly accuses Labour MPs of being ‘frightened’ of an election. At least two British tabloids take up the ‘chicken’ line in their front page headlines:
To return to the subject of Northern Ireland, what I’m most interested in here is the rhetoric that surrounds Johnson’s coinage of the term ‘surrender bill’. Fintan O’Toole has brilliantly analysed this use of hysterical language in his book Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (UK: Head of Zeus, 2018), in which he interprets the ‘structure of feeling’ (Raymond Williams) that underlies Brexit as a ‘strange sense of imaginary oppression’ (p. xxii): a fantasy of English nationalism in which the EU is cast as a German-led neo-fascist dictatorship from which England needs to ‘Take Back Control’, in the words of the Brexit campaign slogan for the 2016 Referendum. The perjorative ‘surrender’ bill likens the parliamentary opposition to no-Brexit to ‘cheese eating surrender monkeys’, the phrase that was made up by a writer for the Simpsons TV series in 1995 to mock the French capitulation to the Germans in WWII. O’Toole extrapolates further from this deranged myth of English capitulation to Europe by describing how Brexit rhetoric conjures up:
…the fever-dream of an English Resistance, and its weird corollary: a desire to have actually been invaded so that one could – gloriously – resist. And not just resist but, in the ultimate apotheosis of masochism, die. Part of the allure of romantic anti-imperial nationalism is martyrdom. The executed leaders of the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, for example, stand as resonant examples of the potency of the myth of blood sacrifice. But in the ironic reversal of zombie imperialism, the appropriation of the imagery of resistance to a former colonizing power, this romance of martydom is mobilized as defiance of the EU.
Fintan O’Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (UK: Head of Zeus, 2018), 51.
These ideas resonate in Boris Johnson’s recent response to the prospect of further delays to Britain’s exit from the EU on 31 October. Remember back in June, before he was appointed PM, Johnson vowed on Talk Radio to secure Britain’s departure from the EU ‘do or die, come what may‘, with the ‘can do’ spirit of the plucky English character witnessed at Dunkirk (the latter, in O’Toole’s interpretation, ‘more toxic waste from the faded myths of English character as pain-as-redemption’, another ‘grand heroic failure’ (pp. 230-1)). This week, Johnson would rather ‘die in a ditch’ than delay Brexit.
O’Toole’s book focuses on Brexit as an essentially English phenomenon, but in Northern Ireland ‘No Surrender’ has a distinctly (white, marginalised and self-pityingly beleaguered) British identity all its own.
When I was in Belfast earlier this week, I found the line ‘No Surrender to the E.U.’ scrawled beneath an International Day of Peace mural. The wall is positioned in a buffer zone between two gates – still able to be closed at short notice to prevent access – in a ‘peace wall’ along Cupar Way between the (predominantly unionist/Protestant) Shankill Road neighourbood towards the left and the (predominantly republican/Catholic) Falls Road towards the right of the image below.
‘No Surrender to the E.U.’ – graffiti beneath an ‘International Day of Peace’ mural in the buffer zone between the Shankill and Falls Road neighbourhoods in Belfast. Photo: Louise Garrett, 2019.
The ‘peace walls’ or ‘peace lines’ are a series of security barriers in Northern Ireland that started going up in 1969 at the start of civil unrest in the region (‘the Troubles’) to separate predominantly Catholic rebublican neigbourhoods that identify with the Irish nationalist cause and Protestant loyalist groups that identify themselves as British Unionists. The original walls were roughly erected by residents during rioting in Derry, Belfast and elsewhere in Northern Ireland urban areas where Catholic and Protestant communities lived in close proximity to one another. The walls were then incorporated into the British government’s strategy to contain sectarian violence, establishing internal borders that reinforced patterns of division and disconnection. In time, the consolidated control zones were fortified by watchtowers and security cameras. A 2017 report by the Belfast Interface Project identified 116 existing security barriers in four urban areas in Northern Ireland. By far the highest density of these are located in Belfast.
The scrawl is at once a nod to the incoherent call to ‘sovereignty’ (‘Take Back Our Borders’) that colours Brexit rhetoric, a re-drawing of unionist battle-lines in opposition to republican desires for Irish unification, and a put down of the ongoing peace process and power-sharing initiatives that the mural above is designed to represent. The slogan also speaks from a minority position, since the Northern Irish electorate voted Remain in the 2016 Brexit referendum. Yet Teresa May’s deal with Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to prop up the Tories in key Commons’ votes following the 2017 Election ‘ended up giving a far louder and more insistent voice to a marginal expression of vestigial Britishness’, according to O’Toole (Heroic Failure, p. 223). In the no-man’s land of this defensive architecture and its clearly inscribed internal borders in West Belfast, anatagonism – of a distinctively loyalist flavour – still putters away. In the hands of the Brexiteer, ‘No Surrender to the EU’ offers a glimpse into what O’Toole describes a ‘form of self-pity that goes into the making of Brexit: the colonizer imagining itself to be the colonized’. (p. 76).
A view of part of a multi-level security barrier in West Belfast separating the Shankill and Falls Road ‘interface communities’. Photo: Louise Garrett, 2019.‘Peace Line’ security gates between the Shankill and Falls Roads neighbourhoods (Protestant and Catholic populated areas, respectively) in Belfast . The gates are able to be closed at specified times to restrict access between ‘interface communities’. Photo: Louise Garrett, 2019.
I saw another sign (there are numerous) redolent of the permanent paranoia of the unionist ‘No Surrender’ message painted on a section of wall, which can be seen from the 17th-century city walls in Derry. These ‘Londonderry’ walls were built between 1613 and 1618 by the Irish Society as defences for early seventeenth century colonial settlers from England and Scotland. On the sign, the ‘Londonderry West Bank Loyalists’ proclaim they are ‘Still Under Siege: No Surrender’. In this historical relic, the ‘West Bank Loyalists’ take a nostalgic long view back to the former glories of the 1689 Siege of Derry and the 1690 defeat of the Catholic King James II by Protestant William of Orange (William III) at the battle of the Boyne. These are the touchstones for the Orange Order and its ‘glorious revolution’ – celebrated by loyalists to this day with marches, flute bands, sashes and murals. Murals in the Shankill neighbourhood of Belfast depict a victorious William of Orange on horseback alongside celebrations of the prowess of 36th Ulster Division at the (grim and disastrous) battle of the Somme. Red poppies and Union Jacks abound, intermingled with the red hand symbol of Ulster and multiple other factional symbols. Other murals commemorate deaths of loyalist volunteers during the Troubles. The motto of the Ulster Volunteer Force, the Ulster loyalist paramilitary group established in 1966, is ‘For God and Ulster’. The group’s declared mission was to combat reblicanism and, in the Ulster unionist narrative, the Somme acted as a counterweight to the events of Easter 1916. Phillip Orr reports, in an article in the Irish Times, that ‘Orange Lodges were established in memory of the battle, banners featured the deeds of first World War soldiers, new commemorative sashes and collarettes were worn and a lore was created that included stirring stories of Orangemen going into battle wearing their regalia and calling out “No Surrender.”’ After WWI and the partition of Ireland (críochdheighilt na hÉireann, 1920-1), Northern Ireland loyalists started to commemorate the Somme annually on 1 July, the date of the battle of the Boyne on the old, pre-Gregorian calendar – a day on which Orange services and parades were already taking place. At the other pole, a reblican group called 1916 Societies have erected a placard in the Bogside area of Derry – the site of the Bloody Sunday atrocity – that demand ‘Irish Unity Now’ and ‘No Border’. Meanwhile, back in Westminster, we have clown prince Boris riding roughshod over these deeply imprinted divisions, wantonly brandishing the ‘No Surrender’ regalia (but with no clue about the implications of this rhetoric in relation to the history and current state of affairs of Northern Ireland).
Loyalist placard as seen from the 17th-century city walls in Derry. The walls were built between 1613 and 1618 by the Irish Society as defences for early seventeenth century settlers from England and Scotland. Photo: Louise Garrett, 2019.Placard erected by 1916 Societies calling for ‘No Border’ and ‘Irish Unity Now’. Bogside, Derry. Photo: Louise Garrett, 2019.
Friday 6 September, 2019: The ‘contents’ have it. The Benn bill, intended to prevent a no-deal Bexit, passes through the House of Lords. The final steps towards this legislation becoming law is royal assent, due to be received on Monday. According to the Guardian, Johnson responds by writing to Tory members on Friday evening ‘pledging to break the law that will require him to seek an extension of article 50. “They just passed a law that would force me to beg Brussels for an extension to the Brexit deadline. This is something I will never do.”’ The PM is further into the throes of fascism, it seems. In the outlandish rhetoric of a ‘No Surrender’ Brexit, the Guardian reports that ‘former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith encouraged Johnson to break the law, saying he would be seen as a Brexit “martyr” if judges opted to put him jail for breaching parliament’s terms.’
