11th November 2021
Earlier this week I did a podcast with some wonderful Irish lawyers – you can hear my high-pitched Brummie Wednesday Addams voice here:
Law on Trial: listen to the 5th ep of @businessposthq new legal podcast with @davidallengreen on the Good Friday Agreement & Gemma McLoughlin Burke from @ICCLtweet on the Special Criminal Court. Plus 100 yrs of women at the Bar.https://t.co/WHVYFiAFC0
— Catherine Sanz (@sanzscript) November 10, 2021
On the podcast I set out why I aver that the Good Friday Agreement is more practically important as a constitutional text than, say, Magna Carta.
And at the end of my bit, I say something about the problem of Anglocentrism in law and policy commentary.
This is not a direct personal concern: I am from the English midlands (though like others from Birmingham I have Irish ancestors); I went to university in Oxford and then Birmingham; and I trained and still practice as a lawyer in London – and so I have spent almost all my life in a strip of England some hundred-or-so miles long.
It is more of an intellectual concern: an interest in getting things right and having the best possible understanding of what is going on.
And over time I have come to realise that an Anglocentric view of law and policy is a narrow, shallow and intellectually unsatisfying one.
It is not that is more ‘woke’ (or something) to avoid being Anglocentric, it is just about having a deeper, wider and intellectually satisfying appreciation of law and policy.
The United Kingdom in its current configuration is barely one hundred years old; and the United Kingdom is itself only from 1801.
There are buildings in Birmingham – a modern city – older than the United Kingdom.
It is a temporary – perhaps transient – polity in its current form, and to see it as being only about England is to miss what is distinctive about this particular union.
And to see Northern Ireland other than in the context of the island of Ireland is to understand very little about why and how the issue of the Irish border affects the politics of the United Kingdom.
The border issue is not some outside interference to an understanding of the politics of United Kingdom: it is a fundamental part of the politics of United Kingdom.
This is why the document that sets outs out the principles that are to be applied on the issue of the Irish border – the Good Friday Agreement – shapes what can and cannot be done by the government of the United Kingdom.
The instrument practically stops the United Kingdom from doing things it otherwise would want to do, but for the agreement.
And so only by seeing the agreement as a constitutional feature rather than as a constitutional bug can you fully appreciate the parameters of political action in the United Kingdom.
But to do that requires a non-Anglocentric approach – to realise there are features of the other constituent nations of the United Kingdom that are just as (if not more) important than anything that comes from England – or London – alone.
To understand the constitution of the United Kingdom you need to understand it as being about the whole of the United Kingdom, and not as about only England with appendages.
The less Anglocentric the approach to the constitution of the United Kingdom – and thereby to the law and policy of the United Kingdom – the better your understanding.
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I look forward to listening to it. It should be sent to Frost’s inbox too.
How true of life in general – better not observed and analysed through anglocentric lenses.
I am sorry that I pressed publish prematurely, hence typos. Sorry.
A folk singer in the ’30s returned home to Birmingham after a few decades away and remarked that he did not recognise the place, it had all changed.
And that was when the city was a town in the 1830s.
Birmingham has always been a work in progress.
The Irish interest in Birmingham, it has included electioneering for the Irish general elections in recent decades past, baffles many, but it reflects the centuries old connections between the settlement and the country.
I well recall sitting through a briefing from an Irish civil servant urging that the then Employment Service to treat those of Irish descent as a special case when considering eligibility for jobsearch support and training, alongside (disadvantaged) minority groups like lone parents and people with disabilities/the disabled.
A colleague of mine, who rarely spoke, but when he did, folk listened, asked in the context of Birmingham, how many had connections with Ireland?
The reply was around 50% (rather undermining the request being made for particular consideration by nationality, a novel category in itself).
It has been said, not wholly accurately by any means, that you may tell a Brummie by the shamrock in their turban.
Some years later in the mid 2000s, I was in a meeting where a pitch was being made for a museum in Digbeth to commemorate the contribution of Irish immigrants to Birmingham. It was a non starter, but one hoped to steer the conversation around to a project commemorating the contribution of all immigrants to the city.
It had to be one museum for all, because it was never going to be one for each of the many immigrant communities in the city, defined by ethnicity and/or geography.
A chap in his early 20s, remarked that the Irish connection with Birmingham was just a few centuries old.
Sharp intakes of breath all round from veterans of these meetings.
Thankfully, a kind soul tactfully explained that recent evidence suggested the De Bermingham family, Norman in descent, had owned a plantation in Ireland some 800 years ago.
Around the same time, I attended an event along with colleagues of Irish descent that was focused on disseminating the results of a piece of survey work, conducted by an Irish academic, about the disadvantaged position of the Irish diaspora.
I had anticipated a relaxing time and refreshments rather than having to consider how to restrain usually phlegmatic colleagues and a particular good friend from starting a riot.
They felt the academic was presenting the community in a poor light and that (much to my pleasant surprise, given my regular brief), any way, what was disadvantaging Bridget was equally bad for Bina.
Is Birmingham a model for seeing the United Kingdom differently?
I do not know, but feel free to come here and find out, explore the Gay Quarter; the Irish Quarter (no shamrockery there); the Balti Quarter …
Me?
I was born here. Two quarters Midlander; one quarter from Hastings and the remainder from the Valleys and according to family stories, possibly related to both David Lloyd George and/or Aneurin Bevan, potentially making me a member of the Taffia.
What I never want to experience, again, or for others to experience for the first time is something like my mother’s palpable fear as I perused the toys on the 5th floor of Lewis’s department store in Birmingham city centre to the sound of police sirens.
It was the early 1970s after the pub bombings.
The Good Friday Agreement is not just for Ireland, but for Birmingham, Deal, Warrington …
And woe betide Frost and Johnson, if they bring back the days of civil servants (in Birmingham!) checking under their cars with a wing mirror on a pole for explosive devices.
There was no border between Birmingham and Belfast in those days.
And I would like it to stay that way, but in the good, positive way that it has become.
And there is no Welsh border for Brummies, because Barmouth is one of our outer suburbs.
Your reference to terrorism is material.
Brexit was in part due to the failure of UK politicians to communicate not only that the EU always was and still is a peace project but also to consider the nature of peace.
It is not just France v Germany.
It is all those communities all over Europe that consider themselves to be on the wrong side of a border, some of whom are then inclined to throw a bomb or two to prove the point.
By working under the banner “united in diversity” which promotes tolerance, fudging borders and promoting cross-border working the EU allows these issues to settle, even if they do not disappear.
A further problem of the UK has been the unwillingness to see Europe’s longest-running and deadliest terrorist insurgency as a massive failure of British statecraft.
(The UK did not ensure that Stormont treated all residents fairly; the UK did not ensure that Irish Roman Catholics felt that the UK was their home.)
Not considering Northern Ireland as a policy failure, those Brexiters who do not wish to see the EU collapse see the EU as necessary or beneficial for lesser nations, but believe that the powerful and successful UK has no need of it.
There is no way out of Brexiters’ Northern Ireland trilemma. You cannot have all three of no hard border in Ireland, no border in the Irish Sea and being outside the Single Market and the Customs Union.
Those technological fixes, much vaunted by Brexiters, that would make a land border invisible seem not to work on a sea crossing.
All involved will lose from the thoughtless belligerence of Johnson and Frost. The question is who will lose most.
If you exit a peace project you put peace at risk.
“If you exit a peace project you put peace at risk.”
That’s a very good point!
Thank you – this was very interesting to read.
Great comment. Just one point to make and that’s there was a border between Birmingham and Belfast in those days – at least I still have memories as a child of my dad’s car disembarking the ferry from Belfast in Stranraer and being taken to pieces to look for weapons/bombs. There was a significant security checks between NI and GB, and there were also significant security borders all over NI itself (you couldn’t drive into central Belfast without having your car stopped at a barrier and searched). Something that is not often mentioned is the Good Friday Agreement was not just responsible for removing barriers at the Irish land border.
“The border issue is not some outside interference to an understanding of the politics of United Kingdom: it is a fundamental part of the politics of United Kingdom.
This is why the document that sets outs out the principles that are to be applied on the issue of the Irish border – the Good Friday Agreement – shapes what can and cannot be done by the government of the United Kingdom.”
Borders create challenges and issues throughout any nations history – it goes with the territory so to speak.
Then, unfortunately for the then status quo the ‘pesky’ democratic decision by a nation to leave both a trading & political union ( aka The EU) comes along. Who would have thought it, eh?.
There are many who would argue that Brexit ought never to have happened ( or be allowed to happen) – the reality is that it did and it can’t easily ( or ought) to be undone. We are were we are, as the saying goes.
I’m becoming more of the view that it will be via NI consent to live with/ditch the NIP that decides the eventual outcome of the protocol – as most lawyers know, bad contracts like poor treaties don’t stand the test of time – the NIP will stand/fall on its own merits – we’ve not got long to find out.
As you say, we are where we are.
A majority in Northern Ireland of those who voted in the referendum in 2016, cast their votes for Remain.
In 2021, they have had to settle for less than that for which they voted in 2016 and most are trying to make a go of it along with a fair few pragmatic Leave supporters.
The hardcore of the minority in Northern Ireland who voted Leave in 2016, many of whom campaigned for a Hard, if not a No Deal Brexit, thereafter, are the ones not accepting the reality of the situation in 2021.
They did, after all, get Brexit done …
It was very heartening to learn from Patrick Kielty’s recent TV programme that good people on all sides in Northern Ireland (and there are more than two sides) are desperate to navigate through Lord Frost’s mess to the sunlit uplands, whilst enjoying the benefits of his negotiations for them, but of which he would now deprive them in order to prove that a softer Brexit is not a better Brexit than the Hard Brexit he negotiated for Britain.
The Hard Brexit that he now disavows.
Confused?
Northern Ireland in 2021, by the way, is not worth the bones of a single Warwickshire Fusilier.
The sooner the Unionist establishment and the Loyalist criminals get that then the better for all concerned in Northern Ireland, especially them.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000zpw3
People can peskily and democratically vote to award themselves a million pounds each but that doesn’t mean they are entitled to it.
There was consideration. Ireland removed its constitutional claim to the Six Counties as a part of the Good Friday Agreement. The GFA restrains the UK from putting up a border on the island of Ireland. Deal with it.
“I’m becoming more of the view that it will be via NI consent to live with/ditch the NIP that decides the eventual outcome of the protocol – as most lawyers know, bad contracts like poor treaties don’t stand the test of time – the NIP will stand/fall on its own merits – we’ve not got long to find out.”
My point is that consent has already been given.
Only a minority in Northern Ireland, albeit a vociferous one, would scrap the Northern Ireland Protocol.
The first duty of any government is to preserve the peace.
It is irresponsible in the extreme, therefore, for the Government at Westminster to encourage that minority to think the NIP might be radically altered, if not scrapped.
That minority does not expect to have its views on the NIP endorsed at the Northern Ireland Assembly elections in May 2022 and is thus seeking to use extra-Parliamentary activity, including the threat of violence and actual violence to achieve its goals.
A spotty Herbert, who looked like he did not need to shave, a self styled Loyalist, went on Zoom, earlier this year in front of a Parliamentary select committee and threatened those who disagree with his demands with violence.
For some in Northern Ireland, such an approach is still considered to be a legitimate negotiating tactic.
We would not accept such threats from that youth’s opposite numbers so why should we consider give his arguments consideration (or seek his consent) until, at the very least, to use his argot, violence is definitely off the table?
The clock is turning back to 1968 and surely no one wants that, especially when the last time that the British Army was this small was in 1714?
And, heaven knows, when it was that 10% of the British Army were foreign mercenaries.
I am confident the Gurkhas would do a sterling job, but, in some quarters in Northern Ireland, they would be as welcome as the Metropolitan Police were in the Valleys of South Wales when they were deployed there during the Miners Strike of 1910-1911.
I am all for policing with consent, but it is not usual to seek the consent of criminal elements when seeking to enforce law and order.
The pesky democrats ( like it or not) voted for Brexit with a small but sufficient majority – without a time machine it’s hard to change the outcome. Irrespective, most folk agree that it was a UK wide referendum ( at least on the ballot paper I had) and that the outcome bound the UK as a whole, GB &NI to the majority ( of voters) decision. Whilst I wouldn’t pick ‘entitled’ as being the most appropriate word, it could & can be easily argued tat that the outcome ( under the rules) of the rreferendum justifued us ( UK all of it) leaving the EU – ‘dem da rules’.
Now there is much gas lighting/talking of retaliation if the UK invoke Article 16 of the NIP – I’ve no idea what Frost is thinking but Varadkar/Coveney seem to have special insight via their respective glass ball’s.
The EU and RoI will find out relatively soon, that if they do give 12 months notice to quit the TCA ( as is their right, well it is the EU not RoI) what the effects of a hard border and its effect on RoI/NI will be. ‘dem da rules to protect the SM’
Many more of us would prove recent Irish ancestry if we could. Then we could apply for a first-rate Irish passport giving freedom of movement within 27 European countries, instead of the second-rate Anglo-British one which no longer does.
I was brought up in the unenlightened West Midlands of the 70s and 80s to regard Ireland and the Irish as a joke. The joke is well and truly on England now.
Today’s post is really thought-provoking, thank you.
You write that the UK is more/different to England plus some appendages and you are absolutely right. The current structure of the UK does no-any any good, it’s not fair on England as there is no devolution and it is not fair on the other parts of the UK as they are largely overlooked and ignored in political discussions.
Additionally, the concentration of the political, economic, financial and cultural activity of the country in a small corner is not beneficial, neither for the inhabitants of Greater Londonshire nor for the people elsewhere. It is my view that for the UK to survive there needs to be a considerable re-balancing and not only in political, constitutional arrangements. However, my expectation of that happening is low.
PS I live in Scotland.
I was recently speaking to a very well-educated English friend and in the course of the conversation it turned out he knew almost nothing about Scotland’s constitutional history.
For example he didn’t know:
1. How Scottish laws were passed before the Scottish Parliament.
2. That Scotland had a fully devolved government for nearly a century before the current Scottish Government arrangement existed.
3. That the Conservative party is relatively new in Scotland and that it was the 1980’s before all Conservative MP’s stood under that party name.
4. That in some areas there was more devolution historically than there is today.
It’s very hard to understand the present if you don’t understand the past.
As someone from Ireland who has lived in the UK for many, many years the entire brexit saga has been an eye-opener. The cavalier, ambivalent attitude towards NI & Ireland from the Leave advocates didn’t come as a huge surprise; but the acquiescence of the media and the wider public, certainly was.
That the government has continued the blatantly misleading narrative & attempting to rewrite their own history, is a huge disappointment & paradoxically, their efforts to undermine the NIP are serving to underscore the complete disdain they have shown for the people of NI.
This anglocentric government seems to regard its own constitution as something flexible, to be bent to the whim of the day and, at the same time, ignore an equally valid, written constitution underpinned by referendum on both sides of the border, and underwritten by the two sovereign nations, the EU and the US.
On present form, any hopes of a change of that might see a diminution of this corrosive anglocentricity & appreciate a wider view are likely to be dashed.
Listened and concluded ‘Anglocentrism’ seems a polite word for ‘selfishness’.
Sooner or later selfish children get to stand on the naughty step or they don’t get any cake.
Not a legal point but on my English degree course at London University back in the 1970s writers such as Yeats, Swift and Heaney came under the heading “English,” entirely robbed of their very essence. As Heaney said:
“Be advised my passport’s green.
No glass of ours was ever raised to toast the Queen.”