Johnson blames today’s Brexit woes on Brussels – that’s a load of old bull

theguardian.com:

It’s taken a while, but I’ve finally spotted one of those “Brexit opportunities” cited in the job title of the cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg. Thanks to the UK’s departure from the European Union, the British government has gifted us with an apparently bottomless supply of industrial-strength bullshit.

I use the term in the sense distilled by the eminent philosopher Harry G Frankfurt, whose bestselling treatise, On Bullshit, defined it as speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. While your basic liar cares about the truth enough to hide it, the pedlar of bullshit is unbothered whether their words are true or false, so long as the listener is persuaded. Insouciance towards the facts is the essential trait. The Brexit project was always rich in bullshit – the £350m on the side of the bus could have come straight from Frankfurt’s essay – so it’s hardly a surprise that this government of Brexiters has become a world-beating producer of the stuff.

Its latest batch relates to the Northern Ireland protocol, which the government says is “fundamentally undermining” the Good Friday agreement that brought peace to the province after three decades of murderous war. The Democratic Unionist party, which campaigned hard for leave in 2016 – even as Northern Ireland voted to remain by 56% to 44%– so despises the protocol, it refuses to take up its place in Belfast’s devolved institutions until it’s gone. The Northern Ireland minister Conor Burns waves before the cameras a thick ream of documents showing the sheer volume of paperwork the protocol demands simply to move goods between Northern Ireland and Great Britain.

Who, the unsuspecting viewer wonders, could be responsible for such a heinous measure? Which authority, either