
Beatrice F. 🇪🇺 @beafk.bsky.social
36.9K posts

Beatrice F. 🇪🇺 @beafk.bsky.social
@beafk18
Interior designer, housewife, Italian-British - but above all -European - choc & cake lover, vegetarian, dreamer. Married to the most wonderful Finnish man!












Here’s a thing. A big thing, though it looks boring (the government has agreed to new ‘import requirements… to protect against specific plant pests’). It’s what Starmer’s EU reset - building on Sunak’s Windsor Framework - means for the UK. The Windsor Framework agreed to permanently maintain EU rules for the economy of Northern Ireland in order to deliver a key demand of Irish nationalism: no checks on goods crossing the border with the Republic. The result is that the checks have to take place on the border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland - but hang on, isn’t the United Kingdom of ‘Great Britain and Northern Ireland’... a country? You don’t have customs checks within a country - do you? Yes we do! A whacking great customs border down the Irish Sea, dividing the United Kingdom in two. On one side of the sea - sovereignty, with the public electing the people who make the laws; on the other side - vassal status, with other people in another country (the officials of the European Commission) making the laws they must live under, with no right of representation. So what about these plant pests? Starmer’s big idea to get the British economy moving is to align the UK with the failing, low-growth, shrinking-trade bloc that is the EU. The new regulations will ensure the whole of the UK, not just Northern Ireland, follows EU rules on plant imports. The whole point of Brexit was to plot our own path through the threats and opportunities of the 21st century. The EU is killing the industries of the future; the UK can lead in them - but not if we agree to align with failure. By the way, it’s not as if the agreement to align the whole of the UK with the EU will end the outrage of an internal customs border within our country. The new regs will simply maintain the status quo, giving hauliers crossing the Irish Sea with goods intended for consumption in Northern Ireland (not to cross into the blessed Republic and the EU) the privilege of the ‘green lane’, ie slightly lighter-touch customs, rather than the full-fat version applied to goods on their way to Europe. What has happened is that Boris Johnson’s delay to Brexit for Northern Ireland, negotiated under pressure in 2019-20 and always intended to be temporary, was made permanent by Sunak and is now being extended to the whole of the UK by Starmer. The history of terrorism in the province, the trauma of violence, has been exploited by the EU first to make Brexit incomplete and now to undo it altogether. Brussels is using the threat of renewed terrorism to insist that the ordinary rights of nations, to control their own external borders, do not apply in this case - even though the sort of high-tech invisible border that is needed is in place at borders (including other EU borders) around the world. This is a harbinger of Britain’s reabsorption into the EU under Starmer’s proposed European Partnerships Bill. The new rules on plant imports derive from an earlier directive whose title eloquently expresses the issue: ‘REGULATION (EU) 2023/1231 OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 14 June 2023 on specific *rules relating to the entry into Northern Ireland from other parts of the United Kingdom* of certain consignments of retail goods’. Thus the EU makes rules for the internal affairs of the UK. The new regs are being introduced via ‘Secondary Legislation’ i.e. with no need for a debate in Parliament. The House of Lords Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee gave them a cursory glance this week (scroll to bottom: publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld5902/ldse…). They noted the objections by me and others, without engaging with them, let alone asking the Government to respond. Thus Parliament hands back sovereignty, so painfully won in the years after the referendum 10 years ago.












