Lord of the Brits

Great literature is immortal and can speak to us down the generations.

 Lord of the Flies by William Golding tells the cautionary tale of a bunch of British schoolboys who, in a sense, take back control on a remote island. They quickly establish a dominance hierarchy and Ralph is the anointed leader.

However, this descends into paranoia driven in-fighting by a dangerously ambitious chap called Jack.

Most of the island is eventually consumed in a deliberately started fire.

The Royal Navy officer who finally arrives on the island remarks that it is disappointing to see British boys behaving in such a savage manner.

In terms of writing about what you know, Golding himself was a Royal Navy officer who took part in the unit for the Bismarck and commanded a landing craft on D-Day.

Golding’s dystopian tale was intended to warn us that civilisation is merely a veneer that can be more or less rapidly stripped away in certain circumstances.

It also showed the dangers of groupthink.

He passed away in 1993, just as the British angst over the Maastricht Treaty began.

Today there is a Jack in Number Ten, and the scary beast that he uses to exert control over his followers is the European Union, which is hiding in the forest of trade regulations.

Colleagues on the continent look on in slightly disinterested amusement as the Brits tie themselves in post-Brexit knots.

Here in Ireland, in both jurisdictions, we have a legitimate vested interest in the Etonians who seem determined to burn down the forest.

The British government is about to break international law that, as they say in crime fiction, opens the door to re-imposing a physical land border on this island.

I wrote this piece for Bella Caledonia in February 2016, i.e. BEFORE the Brexit referendum.

This seems worrying prescient:

There is nothing that the PUL community would love more than for the blurry border at the Lifford Bridge to become once more a Checkpoint Billy.

Since the Northern Ireland Protocol partially came into effect (there are various “grace periods” on some checks) political unionism has been marching and protesting about the minor trade regulations at ports in Narne Arne.

This was only this week.

Heartbreaking…

Meanwhile, the business community in the Six Counties is the only part of the UK that has unfettered access to the Single Market for goods.

That’s actually quite a nice spot to be in.

The Northern Ireland Protocol is a messy solution to the hard Brexit that Jack, sorry Boris, pushed through after he toppled Theresa May.

That became part of the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) which is now an international treaty between the EU and the UK.

Once signed, states are meant to abide by such treaties.

Excellent reporting from the Westminster village today appears to be confident that to maintain his top spot Prime Minister Johnson seems determined to rip up the WA with the European Union.

If you are reading this in Fair Caledonia (where the Google thingy says that most of ye are) and you think this stuff doesn’t concern you, then a trade war with the EU will put you straight on that.

We in Ireland are prisoners of geography to have such dysfunctionally perfidious neighbours.

For Native Shore, I had to invent a British Prime Minister, the Rt Hon Rupert Stafford- Critchlow MP.

Dear reader, if I used even a smidgin of the Boris backstory then my character wouldn’t be believable.

For the avoidance of doubt, I didn’t.

I wanted to keep it real.

See the problem?

The late William Golding would have understood.