The government is picking a fight with reality with its NI protocol bill

theguardian.com:

It isn’t every day that former prime ministers set old party enmities aside to deliver a unified message on a matter of national urgency. When John Major and Tony Blair did it in June 2016, warning that Brexit would jeopardise the delicate balance of peace in Northern Ireland, it rightly led the news.

But not for long: the two prime ministers did not grace a single English newspaper front page the following morning. The media caravan moved on briskly. Besides, Northern Ireland was exactly the kind of serious, complicated and historically knotty subject that referendum coverage swerved to avoid. In fact, in a survey by King’s College London, analysing 350,000 articles in print and online across the 10-week referendum campaign, Northern Ireland didn’t register as an issue at all.

One of the remain side’s biggest mistakes (one among many) was to campaign as if the result depended on the consequences implied by the question on the ballot paper; as if Britain would choose whether to reject EU membership on the basis of what that decision meant. The leave side fought instead on the basis that the decision could mean anything you wanted, and that so-called consequences were scare stories put about by a cosy elite with a vested interest in the status quo; people like Blair and Major.

Six years later, the structure of the argument hasn’t changed. Only pro-Europeans speak of consequences, while Brexiteers campaign against them, as if the remainers won. Only, with Boris Johnson in Downing Street they can now write their delusions into law.

That is the perverse genesis of the bill that was published on Monday, ostensibly to fix the Northern Ireland protocol of the withdrawal agreement – the treaty that Johnson signed in 2019. The