Official Communication from the UFA

Posted by Jim on January 23, 2019

Theresa May intends to jettison the Good Friday Agreement

Posted by Jim on

Be warned, Theresa May intends to jettison the Good Friday Agreement  
Theresa May doesn’t have a reputation for flexibility and collaboration.Brian Feeney. Irish News. Belfast . Wednesday, January 23, 2019 

History has proved Charles de Gaulle right on all counts about British governments.

In his memoirs he wrote … “For England, (he preferred to call them the English) there is no alliance that would hold, no treaty respected, no truth which matters.” That was his conclusion after being tricked and traduced by the British throughout the last war, long before he became president of France.

He was right to veto the UK’s entry to the EEC as it was in 1963 and again in 1967. In 1963 he said, ‘England isn’t a big deal any more.’ De Gaulle correctly believed that Britain still clung to imperial delusions and preferred its ties to former colonies. He said, ‘The England of Kipling is dead.’ Leading figures in the Conservative party didn’t think so and, as De Gaulle predicted, sucked up to America as a way to masquerade as a world power. The UK wasn’t reconciled to being a medium-sized European power and in the intervening decades we see quite clearly still hasn’t become reconciled to that role.

When the British were finally admitted to the EEC in 1973 they joined with many reservations, political and psychological. Many British politicians continued to refer to ‘Europe’ because they never felt European or part of any European community. The British continually asked for special treatment as De Gaulle foresaw they would. They repeatedly asked for opt-outs which they received. Last March the prime minister of Luxembourg Xavier Bettel summed it up perfectly when he said: ‘They were in with a load of opt-outs. Now they are out, and want a load of opt-ins.’

Back to De Gaulle’s original description. There was no EEC or EU treaty that Britain fully accepted. The same is true today. Four times Theresa May accepted the “ backstop”, starting in December 2017. Yet since then she has repeatedly whined and whinged to have what she agreed undone. She actually wrote a letter to Donald Tusk on March 19 2018 committing to ‘a legally operative backstop solution’ in the Withdrawal Agreement. She then proceeded to send her ministers traipsing around the EU, or ‘Europe’ as she would call it, trying to get the “backstop”changed.

Eventually, in the summer May managed to get the “backstop” expanded – to appease the DUP – from being Northern Ireland specific, to embrace the whole UK. Remember, that was her idea to which Michel Barnier and the EU Commission reluctantly acceded. Then she signed up to it in the final Withdrawal Agreement last November, but immediately ratted on it in true, traditional British fashion just as David Davis ratted on the Joint Report of December 2017 within forty-eight hours.

In essence what all the thrashing about for the last week has been for is trying to find a way out of everything the British government has agreed in the past two years. It’s the same mindset that has dominated the UK’s relations with the EEC and EU for forty-five years. They want the EU to disregard its own rules and legal order to make a special case for the UK. The British government will only agree to a deal they have dictated and even then reserve the right to walk away from it if, some years later, they find they don’t like it. As Professor Brendan O’Leary told a conference on Brexit last summer, Britain is a fundamentally unreliable partner because ‘any parliament can unwind any treaty; it’s not binding in constitutional law.’

Thus for the last few years Britain has been unwinding the Good Friday Agreement because of the government’s reliance on the DUP. John Bruton, of all people, accused the British of ‘tearing up’ the GFA even though the Irish government changed its constitution by referendum to fulfil the requirements of the GFA. The British are wilfully allowing the institutions of the GFA, including the British-Irish Inter-Governmental Conference, and the all-Ireland bodies, to atrophy.

Every time Theresa May says no deal is better than a bad deal it means she intends to jettison the Good Friday Agreement. Of course you need to remember that only a British referendum matters.

“….stupid EU referendum….”

Posted by Jim on January 22, 2019

Tory party was David Cameron’s `only reason for dangerous, stupid EU referendum’
Bimpe Archer. Irish News. Belfast. Tuesday, January 22, 2019

FORMER British prime minister’s “only reason was his own party” for a “dangerous, stupid” EU referendum, a new BBC documentary hears.

During an interview for `Inside Europe: Ten Years of Turmoil’, European Council president Donald Tusk said Mr Cameron admitted he only promised the 2016 vote because he expected to be in another coalition with the Liberal Democrats, who would veto it.

The series, which starts on Monday January 28, features interviews with political figures from all sides of Brexit, including former chancellor George Osborne, ex-foreign secretary William Hague, president of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker and former French presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande.

However, the producers said yesterday, Mr. Cameron, who resigned in 2016 after leading the failed `Remain’ campaign, declined to take part because he has signed an exclusive deal for his memoirs.

Instead former Polish prime minister Mr. Tusk recounts a discussion with him before the referendum, when the then Tory leader was attempting to win concessions from other EU leaders on migrant benefits.

“I told him bluntly, come on David, get real. I know that all prime ministers are promising to help you, but believe me the truth is that no one has an appetite for revolution in Europe only because of your stupid referendum,” Mr. Tusk said.

“If you try to force us, to hurry us, you will lose everything. And for the first time I saw something close to fear in his eyes. He finally realized what a challenge he was facing.”

The former Polish prime minister recalls asking: “Why did you decide on this referendum … it’s so dangerous, so even stupid, you know, and he told me – and I was really amazed and even shocked – that the only reason was his own party”

He said Cameron “felt really safe, because he thought … that there’s no risk of a referendum, because his coalition partner, the Liberals, would block this idea of a referendum.

“But then, surprisingly, he won [the election] and there was no coalition partner. So paradoxically, David Cameron became the real victim of his own victory.”

The further two episodes will look at the Greek financial meltdown and the Syrian migrant crisis.

How did Brexit come to this

Posted by Jim on January 20, 2019

Theresa May’s catalogue of errors led Britian to this point. Now it faces paralysis and humiliation

Jonathan Freedland. Irish Times. Dublin. Wednesday, January 16, 2019

(Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian Columnist)

This was a defeat on a scale without precedent in the era of universal suffrage, a rebuff more humiliating than any endured even by Ramsay MacDonald in 1924. Some 117 Conservatives voted against the signature policy of their own government, thereby triggering a motion of no confidence that, in any normal era, would see the government toppled within hours.

But such are these extraordinary times, that is not even the most significant story from Westminster tonight. What matters more than the fate of this government or this prime minister is the fate of the country and its decision to leave the European Union, which is now suspended in a state of limbo if not purgatory. The law says Britain will leave the European Union in 70-odd days. Yet it has rejected the only firm exit path that exists. It means that, unless something changes and MPs can reach an agreement with each other, Britain will crash out of the EU on March 29 without a deal – an outcome all but the most wild-eyed Brexiteers regard as an economic and social catastrophe for these islands.

So how did it come to this? What led Theresa May, parliament and the country to this moment?

The answer you give will depend on how far back you want to go. You could look to the snap election of 2017, when May threw away her majority, thereby leaving her at the mercy of a hung parliament, where Brexit lacked a majority just as surely as she did. As a simple matter of arithmetic, the defeat tonight was foretold on the night of 8 June 2017.

Or you might go back a few months earlier, to the triggering of article 50, which started the clock ticking on a negotiation for which May was palpably not ready. The cabinet was too split between leavers and remainers to know its own mind. Only in the last few months of the two-year period did the UK have anything like a position.

Or you might say the die was cast much earlier, soon after May became prime minister and painted herself into a corner with a series of bright red lines. Once she had committed to leave the single market, customs union and jurisdiction of the European court of justice, and once she accepted that there could be no hard border in Ireland, then she had all but written the withdrawal agreement that MPs rejected tonight. The EU laws of physics dictated that there could be almost no other outcome.

Of course, May’s drawing of those red lines was itself the fruit of another choice, a political decision that her best hope lay with placating the hardest Brexiteers in her party. She had seen how the Europhobic wing of British Conservatism had devoured so many of her predecessors, and concluded that her own safety required her to placate that faction. Only later did she learn what her predecessors could have told her: that the Europhobes’ demands can never be met because what they want – cake in both its having and eating modes – is impossible.

In this she was repeating an error made by Cameron in 2013, when he announced that there would be an in/out referendum before 2017. He, too, was seeking to placate the hard Brexiteers, seeking to blunt the appeal of Ukip. That was another fateful decision on the road to the vote tonight, one that failed to see that asking voters to approve the status quo in the post-crash era was asking to be punched hard in the face. Critical, too, was Cameron’s conduct of the referendum campaign, with its serial failures – its appeal to voters’ wallets rather than their hearts, its refusal to attack the Tory leaders of the leave campaign, its complacency.

But Cameron also deserves blame for the manner of his departure. Had he delayed his resignation, he could have been around to frame what the referendum result meant. He could have said, for example, that Britons had voted to leave the European Union but had not voted to leave either the single market or customs union, since neither were on the ballot paper. Britons clearly wanted out of the EU’s political institutions, he might have said, but they had not rejected membership of the common market. And so he could have advanced a Norway-style Brexit, one that would have minimized the harm. Instead he fled the scene of his own crime, leaving a vacuum into which rival definitions of Brexit could rush. Within weeks of his exit, Brexit was redefined in the hardest terms.

All these decisions by May and Cameron laid the path to the vote tonight. But, in truth, the path is much longer and older. For at least three decades, “Europe” served as the all-purpose bogeyman of British politics. Cheered on by a Europe-loathing press, itself fuelled by an endless flow of straight banana-type lies, many of them concocted by a Telegraph correspondent in Brussels by the name of Boris Johnson, politicians of all stripes found it convenient to blame Brussels for any and all ills.

How easy it was for British politicians to say they’d love to act on this or that issue, but their hands were tied by those villains in the EU. Every summit was a “showdown” pitting plucky Britain against the wicked continentals. Both of the main political parties played this game. Recall Gordon Brown’s reluctance to be photographed signing the Lisbon treaty. (In the end he signed the treaty in a small room, alone – an early metaphor for the Brexit to come.) Given how long, and how bitterly, the fight against Europe had been fought, what’s remarkable is not how few Britons voted remain in 2016 but how many.

Or you could go further back still. The Suez fiasco of 1956 was meant to have cured Britain of its imperial delusion, but what’s clear now is that many Britons never quite made that adjustment. Underpinning Brexit, with its belief that Britain should separate itself from its closest neighbours, is a refusal to accept that we are one part of an interdependent European economy. For the Brexiteers, Britain remains a global Gulliver tied down for too long by the Lilliputians of little Europe. It is a fundamental misreading of our place in the world.

Perhaps, though, the seeds of the vote tonight were planted in the rubble of Britain’s wartime experience. Never occupied, many Britons never understood the intense need for the European Union as continental Europeans feel it. In 1984, at a ceremony to honor the fallen of Verdun, François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl held hands, in a powerful gesture of Franco-German reconciliation. According to her biographer, Margaret Thatcher was unmoved, instead mocking the sight of two grown men holding hands.

This has been Britain’s European story, repeatedly seeing what was a project of peace, designed to end centuries of bloodshed, as a scam designed to swindle the Brits of their money. You can go further back, to repeated wars against the French, the Spanish and the Germans. Or you can go further back still to the first Brexit nearly five centuries ago, when Henry VIII sought to take back control by breaking from Rome.

Wherever you choose the starting point, the end point is clear enough. It ends like this, in the sight of a parliament paralysed by indecision, still unable to embrace Europe – but just as unable to break away. And in the spectacle of an island lost and adrift.

Derry unites for justice despite hate campaign

Posted by Jim on January 19, 2019

Flags of the British Army’s infamous Parachute Regiment have once again
been erected by loyalists in County Derry in an attempt to inflame
tensions ahead of a march for justice on the anniversary of the Paras’
Bloody Sunday massacre.

Thirteen civil rights demonstrators died after members of the Parachute
Regiment opened fire in Derry’s nationalist Bogside on January 30, 1972.
A 14th person died later.

The flying of the killer regiment’s flags has been branded provocative,
disrespectful and hurtful to families of the victims. They appear every
year in the village of Newbuildings in the run-up to the anniversary of
the killings.

Kate Nash’s brother, William, was among those killed on January 30,
1972. Her father was among the 28 people shot who were shot but
survived.

Ms Nash said that the flying of the Para flags is a hate crime which is
always ignored by the authorities.

“This has become a regular feature for some people in Newbuildings,
Drumahoe and in some parts of the Waterside, but I cannot understand why
we are forced to put up with this year in and year out because to me
this is a hate crime,” she said.

“While I know the vast majority of people in those communities don’t
support these flags flying, the actions of the small number who do this
are hurtful, and it is awful that some people seek to glorify the
soldiers who carried out Bloody Sunday in such a public way.”

Sinn Fein councillor Christopher Jackson called on unionist politicians
to get the flags removed.

“Given the brutal history of the Parachute Regiment in this city, the
erection of these flags is provocative and disrespectful and clearly
designed to hurt the families who had loved ones murdered and injured on
Bloody Sunday,” he said.

“It is also an effort to raise tensions in the greater Waterside area at
a time when many others are working night and day to ease community
tension and build peace.

“I would call on unionist leaders in our city to ensure that these flags
are taken down immediately,” he added.

BROAD SUPPORT FOR MARCH

Meanwhile, a large number of groups in Derry have confirmed that they
will support the forthcoming Bloody Sunday March in Derry later this
month. Five republican groups have now said they would now take part in
the march on Sunday, January 27.

Several organisations pulled out of last year’s march over the apparent
hijacking of the long-standing Bloody Sunday justice campaign to promote
unrelated issues. Saoradh, The Irish Republican Socialist Party,
Independent Republican Councillors, 1916 Societies, and 32 County
Sovereignty Movement, have now said they will join those Bloody Sunday
relatives, the wounded and others who continue to march along the route
from the Creggan Shops to Free Derry Corner.

In a statement, Saoradh again noted that the original civil rights
protest which came under fire had been an anti-internment rally.

“There are currently a number of Irish Republican Political activists
interned by the British State, the same British State responsible for
the war crimes committed on Bloody Sunday,” they said. “We now hope that
the Bloody Sunday March will continue in its original form, giving a
voice and an acknowledgement to Irish Republicans who find themselves
interned and those who represent them.”

Setting out their reasoning in a letter, the other four groups stated:
“As Republicans, we welcome the fact that the Bloody Sunday March for
Justice seems to have returned its focus on putting the responsibility
for injustice where it lies – squarely with the British establishment
and its crown forces.

“The murders carried out in Ireland by the British were and are unjust
and immoral. They were carried out on the orders of the occupying forces
and a government which clearly has no regard for the families of these
murdered Irish citizens, in Derry, Ballymurphy or anywhere in Ireland.

“On this basis, as Republicans we are prepared to show our support and
oppose Imperialism on January 27, by taking part in the march and to
call upon other like-minded Republicans and socialists to join us at the
Bloody Sunday March.”