Saying something doesn't make it true: reality is waiting
Politicians are naturally drawn to platitudes but there is a danger that they start to believe they are reality; leadership means eventually facing up to tough choices
This essay is not (primarily) about the current situation in Israel and Gaza. There is so much—perhaps too much—to be said but I will return to it; today I can’t, not in the halfway-dispassionate way I want and would expect myself to. For reasons I can’t yet adequately explain, the photograph of a young, smiling Norwegian medical student marching through Warsaw, holding a sign with the message “Keep the world clean” and a litter bin bearing the Israeli flag, has knocked me off balance. Is she stupid, thoughless or evil? I don’t know. But I’ve been to Warsaw, and I’ve walked round the site of the Jewish ghetto which existed there from 1940 to 1943. I say “site” quite deliberately because there is nothing left.
In April 1943—80 years ago this year—SS-Brigadeführer und Generalmajor der Waffen-SS und Polizei Jürgen Stroop was sent to Warsaw by Heinrich Himmler to suppress the remnants of the ghetto; the previous SS commander, SS-Oberführer Ferdinand von Sammern-Frankenegg, had lost his nerve and would be court-martialled, essentially for going easy on Jews. Stroop had no such weakness. Although his estimate of two to three days to clear the ghetto provided wildly optimistic, he lacked neither determination nor flexibility: when he encountered stiff resistance from desperate Jewish fighters, he used flamethrowers to burn the Jews out of basements, cellars and sewers and artillery to destroy buildings, methodically razing the ghetto street by street. In the end it took almost exactly four weeks to empty the ghetto, and 13,000 Jews were killed in the process, half of them burned to death or suffocated; 17 German soldiers and policemen lost their lives. Of the 50,000 Jews who survived to be rounded up, almost all were transported to the extermination camps at Treblinka and Majdanek where they could be murdered systematically, their corpses incinerated in the crematoria (at Majdanek) or open-air pits (at Treblinka).
I cannot begin to fathom what I hope is simply the ignorance and stupidity of this young woman; if she is neither ignorant nor stupid then her psyche is a genuinely revolting toxic soup. But as I cannot sit her down and read to her Stroop’s meticulous, 125-page account of his efforts, Es gibt keinen jüdischen Wohnbezirk in Warschau mehr!, there is nothing else to be done at this time. As it happens, her idiocy (if that is what it is) falls at the opposite end of the scale from what I want to examine, which is our apparently abiding faith that if we say the “right” thing, then all will be well.
The reactions of other countries to Hamas’s murderous assault on Israel a fortnight ago, and the ongoing crisis in Gaza which it has engendered—which will get worse before it gets better, if it ever does—have varied in their emphasis. The United States has unhesitatingly and passionately committed itself to helping Israel defend itself, President Biden avowing that he will provide “all appropriate means of support to the Government and people of Israel” and deploying a carrier strike group to the eastern Mediterranean as part of that support. The French embassy in Israel condemned “inadmissible terrorist attacks” by Hamas, and President Macron, often at his best in an international brouhaha, spoke of his “full solidarity with the victims, their families and loved ones”. Germany, which must always play a delicate game when it comes to the Jewish homeland, condemned the attacks; Chancellor Scholz has visited Israel and said clearly “Germany and Israel are united by the fact that they are democratic constitutional states. Our actions are based on law and order, even in extreme situations”.
In the UK, the prime minister has responded with a fierceness which, I confess, has surprised me. After expressing the customary shock, he stated plainly that “Israel has an absolute right to defend itself”, and in a statement to the House of Commons on Monday 16 October he was uncompromising and used language—by coincidence and nothing more, I’m sure—that I had used earlier that day in City AM: “We should call it by its name: it was a pogrom”. He then spent the latter part of last week in shuttle diplomacy around the Middle East, carving out what I thought was a distinctive, robust but measured position for himself and the UK. In addition, his security minister, Tom Tugendhat, a Roman Catholic who has nevertheless encountered anti-Semitism on account of his Austrian Jewish ancestry, exhibited a flash of controlled but unmistakeable anger when former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn hoped for peace in a generalised sense: “Your ‘friends’ Hamas are murdering children and taking civilian hostages. Haven't you said enough?”
Of course some countries have adopted very different stances. President Putin has regretted the deaths on all sides but called it “a clear example of the failure of US policy in the Middle East”, while Sergei Lavrov, the seemingly indestructible foreign minister said that the best way to restore stability was the creation of a fully autonomous Palestinian state. The Chinese foreign ministry blandly said it was concerned “over the current escalation of tensions and violence between Palestine and Israel” and that, as it was “a friend to both Israel and Palestine, what we hope to see is the two countries living together in peace”. Iran, of course, is four-square behind its client Hamas; members of the Islamic Consultative Assembly chanted “Down with Israel”, “Down with America” and “Welcome Palestine”, while President Ebrahim Raisi spoke of the “legitimate defence” of the Palestinians.
My point here is not the view one takes on Israel or the Palestinians. That’s a discussion of intensity and depth which is for another time. But there is one common thread running through most of the public statements by other countries on what os happening in Israel and Gaza, and that is to express hope for a future peaceful status which, to me, has rarely seemed further away.
Consider President Biden speaking in Tel Aviv on 18 October: “We must keep pursuing peace. We must keep pursuing a path so that Israel and the Palestinian people can both live safely, in security, in dignity, and in peace.” Two days later, answering questions about the US citizens among the hostages taken by Hamas, the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, expanded on the same theme:
The vast majority of people, want the same thing. They want a region where countries are working together, where relations are normalized, where there’s greater integration, where people are working together, studying together, traveling, doing business. The overwhelming majority of people want that. And we want to see as well the rights and aspirations of the Palestinian people fulfilled in the context of that kind of region.
Blinken has riffed on this several times over the past week. On 15 October, in Egypt, he presented the futute of the Middle East in binary terms.
There’s a vision that we very strongly espouse that has countries in the region normalizing their relations, integrating, working together in common purpose, and upholding and bringing forth the rights and aspirations of the Palestinian people. That’s one vision; it’s very clear… our responsibility, all of us who believe in that first path—and that’s everyone I talked to—our responsibility is to make it real, to bring it to light, to make it a clear, affirmative choice. And that’s what we’re determined to do.
Our own government has made very similar statements. On 18 October, the UK permanent representative to the United Nations, Dame Barbara Woodward, told the Security Council “the UK will continue to work with partners in the international community to break the cycle of violence across Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories and work towards the peace and security of Israelis and Palestinians”. Visiting Cairo on 21 October, the foreign secretary, James Cleverly, admitted the challenges ahead, but was upbeat. “I still believe that we can work together to secure a future where Israelis and Palestinians live in peace.”
The Labour Party has, so far, been strikingly supportive of the government’s stance, although elements of the party’s Left are clearly uncomfortable with such wholehearted support of Israel. On 16 October, the leader of the opposition, Sir Keir Starmer, responded to the prime minister’s statement with reassuring words.
We must keep striving for a two-state solution: a Palestinian state alongside a safe and secure Israel. We cannot give up on that hope. We cannot let Hamas brutality be a catalyst for conflict in the wider region. Engagement between Israel and Arab nations must be strengthened, not abandoned. International co-operation, the rule of law and a political road to peace—Hamas want us to abandon all three. In defiance, we must be resolute on all of them.
President Macron has stressed the two-state solution: “We cannot resign ourselves to an endless war in this region. The fight against terrorism cannot replace the search for peace. The conditions for a lasting peace are known.” Chancellor Scholz, while laying a heavy emphasis on Germany’s obligations to the State of Israel, suggested that Hamas’s goal in attacking Israel may have been to frustrate the peace process.
That is all the more reason to step up our diplomatic efforts to find solutions for the many conflicts in the region. We will not abandon our goal of ensuring that one day our Israeli friends and the Palestinians who want peace can live side by side and without terror, even if today that seems further away than ever.
These messages are very much from a commonly shared songbook. And you might reasonably wonder what is objectionable about them. Expressing a long-term desire for peaceful co-existence between Israel and a Palestinian state is virtuous, humane and hopeful. It has been the notional basis for a future relationship for longer than I have been alive: the first indication that the Palestine Liberation Organisation (remember them?) would even countenance the idea of two states emerged in the mid-1970s from its representative in London, Said Hammami. When Yasser Arafat issued the Palestinian Declaration of Independence in 1988, the document’s references to United Nations resolutions since 1947 were taken as an implicit acceptance of the existence of Israel and therefore a two-state basis of a future settlement. And it has certainly been a widespread assumption of a prospective reality since the Oslo Accords of 1993.
We may regard that at the long and short of it. Roy Jenkins, the Labour, SDP and Liberal Democrat grandee and author, famously declared that no sentence was interesting unless it was possible to imagine a sane man saying the opposite. Perhaps, then, these paeans to peace are simply boring, pieties which have to be expressed as a piece of ritualism to make sure all parties are still facing in the same direction, and carry no more significance than that. I fear that they do more.
Human beings are fantastically capable of self-delusion. We all know this and we see it all the time, in all sorts of situations. Start at the micro level. Which of us hasn’t had a painful tooth or some minor ailment, and persuaded himself or herself that ignoring it, or “waiting to see if it gets better”, is not only the convenient course of action and, coincidentally, what we want to do, but is actually the most clinically sound way forward? Or that a different route to a familiar destination by public transport will actually be quicker, or more comfortable? We not only tell ourselves lies, but we swallow and rationalise them, just as part of the ceaseless struggle to get through the day.
The problem is that we are not the only ones we seek to deceive. The sociobiologist Robert Trivers has hypothesised that we deceive ourselves in order to deceive others: as he explains in the foreword to Richard Dawkins’s massively influential The Selfish Gene, natural selection must logically favour self-deception as a trait because it makes so unconscious of our trickery that we give away no perceptible signs of it to others. In short, the more you believe a lie, the more convincing you will be to others. (Trivers and his colleagues Daniel Kriegman and Malcolm Slavin deployed this argument in 2020 to explain the success of President Donald Trump is swaying audiences to accept substantial and apparently implausible deceptions, such as that Senator Ted Cruz’s father Rafael, an evangelical preacher, was implicated in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, or that the US armed forces had run out of ammunition when. he took office in 2016.)
This matters because politicians make pronouncements on the situation in the Middle East and always make some reference to a future settlement which will involve Israel having levels of security from terrorism with which it is happy, an independent, self-sufficient Palestinian state which co-exists sufficiently peacefully with Israel and a community of nations into which these two entities slot neatly.
Perhaps one day that will be so. At the moment, however, these are hugely distance prospects. Israel has not enjoyed anything like acceptable security (acceptable on its own terms) for at least two decades; like him or loathe him, one of the reasons Benjamin Netanyahu has been Israel’s leader for so much of that period—he is the country’s longest-serving premier, and has headed the Israeli government from 1996 to 1999, 2009 to 2021 and 2022 to the present—is that he has presented himself as someone who will prioritise the safety of the electorate. There have been occasional cease-fires between Israel and its internal and external enemies, like the cessation of violence with Hamas in 2008, but there has not been a genuine period of peace, only a diminution of the violence. There were some hints of peace in the early 1990s, but those were brought to an end, at the very latest, when Israel’s prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist in November 1995.
It is also hard to see a credible Palestinian state, even if it were controlled by a régime in which Israel had credible faith to maintain security within its own borders and to prevent the export of violence to Israel. The current State of Palestine consists of the physically separate Gaza Strip, run by Hamas, and the West Bank, governed by Fatah, the largest faction of the PLO and the party of the elderly President Mahmoud Abbas; the Palestinians also lay claim to East Jerusalem, which Israel captured during thr Six-Day War of 1967, but I cannot for the life of me anticipate the circumstances under which an Israeli government of any persuasion would cede that part of the Holy City. The two parts of Palestine are therefore not only separate but desperately poor. Perhaps for obvious reasons, the economy is largely dependent on foreign aid; unemployment in Gaza is around 45 per cent, though it is a less hopeless 13 per cent in the West Bank (then again, many of these workers are employed in Israel), what growth there has been is slowing and there is no obvious basis for a thriving economy.
The all-shall-be-well, two-state solution is, therefore, a kind of self-deception. A visitor from another world who applied only existing data and rigorous logic would see no credible basis for it. But we say it will happen, occasionally with the qualification either that the only other option, continuing or escalating violence, is worse, or that there simply is no alternative. But that is plainly not true. No-one would welcome it, but the suspicious, expensive, economically costly status quo clearly could persist. Merely to say that everyone is committed to a peaceful does not bring it any closer; it’s like expressing one’s commitment to winning the lottery without actually buying a ticket, Worse, in some cases, I suggest, it is like hoping that one wins the lottery and believing that the windfall is available simply by that act of hoping earnestly enough, and allowing this confidence to stand in for any active acts of policy.
I’m not a complete cynic in politics. Although I find it refreshing sometimes to strip away unreality and optimism bias, and while I have a real bugbear about the kind of mindset that believes anything can be achieved if everyone just tries a bit harder, I have an idealist streak in me. I think politics can be a power for good on an enormous scale, I think we should believe in things, I think we should embrace aspiration and purpose.
(What I can’t abide is mindless, headgirl, exhortatory management: a profile of Matt Hancock in yesterday’s Times Magazine by Sean O’Neill reveals the disgraced former health secretary to have been monstrously guilty of this: one health industry expert who was drafted in from the private sector during the Covid-19 pandemic recalls Hancock simply annotating memoranda with “x10”, which translated into “You need to do this 10 times better”. Dame Kate Bingham, who chaired the government’s Vaccine Taskforce and was one of the few bona fide successes of the pandemic, remembered observing mildly that it would be a miracle if the government received 30 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine by Christmas 2020, only for Hancock to counter—and my God you can hear his tone of voice—that, in her words, “he kept being told by experts that things were impossible, he said, only to find out later that they were perfectly possible if enough effort was made”. He continued by saying “You can’t just tell me I’m wrong”. The combination of superiority, arrogance and suspicion is quite dazzling but sadly, common in all sorts of sectors.)
On the other hand, I agree, even if I would not make it my watchword, that politics is the art of the possible. The phrase was originally Otto von Bismarck’s, though it was supremely appropriate that the sly old dog Rab Butler chose it as the title for his elegant but slim memoirs. After all, politics is hard work, and if one fixates on an outcome which will simply never happen, then, quite apart from anything else, it is a grotesque waste of time. One might as well be Adolf Hitler lovingly admiring the plans for the Berlin he was going to have Albert Speer remodel after winning the Second World War (it would have been renamed Germania).
My argument, therefore, is that by focusing on these barely plausible ends, you waste time, distort your strategic planning by targeting an objective that is unreachable, and you fail to think critically, imaginatively and rigorously, if at all, about what outcomes you might be able to reach. Briefly, though, to try to make the point more persuasive, let me pan away from the situation in Israel and Gaza, to show that this is a universal issue. Let us look, as almost no-one on the mainland ever wants to hear in a political context, at Northern Ireland.
With what we might euphemistically call “one thing and another” (war in Ukraine, strategic competition with China, looming general election, arguments of identity which for some strike to their very core, a frantic and often ill-humoured debate on migration, an inflation rate which is reluctant to move), it can be easy to let that small but important folder marked “The Windsor Framework” fall out of your mental filing cabinet. You will recall the outline, no doubt: to secure a withdrawal agreement with the European Union by the end of 2019 and show he was “getting Brexit done”, Boris Johnson and his chief negotiatior, David Frost, agreed with the European Commission’s task force, headed by Michel Barnier, that the integrity of the EU’s single market and customs union would be protected by making Northern Ireland de facto an entry point to the EU. Although it would legally be part of the UK customs union, Northern Ireland would remain aligned with the EU on product standards and so on, and goods which were likely to enter Northern Ireland as a first step to be followed by moving into the EU proper would be subject to customs checks on entering Northern Ireland. This meant that there would be no customs checks within the island of Ireland, but that a de facto customs border would exist between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
As legislative measures go, the protocol was about as anti-Unionist as you could imagine, since its main practical effect was to introduce a customs border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Many felt this was not only against the spirit of the Acts of Union 1800, which it manifestly was, but that it infringed Article VI of the union between Britain and Ireland which dealt with free trade. A legal challenge by Unionists secured a concurrence from the High Court of Northern Ireland, but some nimble legal footwork by Mr Justice Colton (who, perhaps unhelpfully, had “form” as a candidate for the Nationalist SDLP in one of the 1986 Northern Ireland by-elections) declared that the apparent inconsistency was all right, because the European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Act 2020 had implicity repealed the measures in the Act of Union which were involved. Phew.
Boris Johnson is not a man known for his sensitivity, nor for his passionate attachment to the truth; but he had said on television in December 2019 “There will be no checks on goods going from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, or Northern Ireland to Great Britain”, an assertion which came to look somewhat less than robust, and in August 2020 he had upped the ante by affirming “There will be no border down the Irish Sea… over my dead body”. These were both, to be brutal, barefaced lies, either deliberate untruths or the result of a profound lack of understanding of international agreements into which he was entering. In any event, it should have surprised no-one that Unionist political leaders were uniformly opposed to the Protocol. Unhappiness at ground level was sufficiently serious that there were eventually riots in Belfast’s Sandy Row. The Protocol had not begun life with enormous public support, and that ebbed away further. When a new Northern Ireland Assembly was elected in May 2022, the Democratic Unionists, pushed into second place by Sinn Féin, to their horror, refused to participate until their problems with the Protocol were addressed. The assembly remains suspended.
In Northern Ireland, it can be difficult to judge what is an insuperable obstacle and what can sometimes melt away like thawing snow unexpectedly, but this issue did have the hallmarks of a three-pipe problem. Hilariously, in June 2022, Johnson’s government introduced a bill to allow it unilaterally to override the provisions of an agreement it had entered into. The Northern Ireland Protocol Bill was introduced by Liz Truss, then foreign secretary, on 13 June, and crawled unhappily through the House of Commons to receive its Third Reading on 20 July, then going to the House of Lords on 22 July, but by that stage Johnson had already announced his departure as prime minister and Truss was in the final two with Rishi Sunak to succeed him. The bill would be given a second reading in the Lords in October but was obviously holed below the waterline, and was eventually left to sink.
In February this year, the prime minister took the opportunity of the fringes of the Munich Security Conference to talk to European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen about the situation on Northern Ireland. Downing Street indicated, with heavy caution, that the dialogue had been positive and the possibility of some kind of resolution was in the air. At the end of that month, Sunak met von der Leyen in Windsor where they announced the agreement of the Windsor Framework, a revised deal which promised to make trade into Northern Ireland less administratively onerous and give the assembly at a greater political role, the so-called “Stormont brake”. As I explained at the time, as a measure of compromise and convenience, the Windsor Framework was a successful step forward, and even if the DUP still refused to allow power-sharing to resume, there was a feeling that the party felt it was being listened to.
Outwith the DUP, and for often self-serving reasons, there was a great deal of celebration. Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald and her Belfast avatar Michelle O’Neill both gave the agreement their support. President Biden hailed it as an “essential step to ensuring that the hard-earned peace and progress of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement is preserved and strengthened”, while Leo Varadkar, recently restored as taoiseach after two years as Micheál Martin’s deputy in the Irish coalition government, piled together all the acknowledgements and cautions required of him:
The Irish Government will do all we can to make these new arrangements work in the interest of people and enterprises in Northern Ireland, here in the Republic of Ireland while protecting the European Single Market and the Common Travel Area between Ireland and the United Kingdom and the Good Friday Agreement.
In Westminster, the pro-Brexit European Research Group damned with faint praise by announcing it would not officially oppose the framework while regarding it as “practically useless”, while Boris Johnson continued to defy the definition of shameless by saying he would find it “very difficult” to endorse the deal as it was “not about the UK taking back control”. This from the man who had agreed the original protocol.
I bring up the Windsor Framework because it continues my argument, in a slightly different form. Sunak did well to achieve a reworking of the original protocol with the European Commission, and the framework should, if it delivers what it promised, make imports and exports in Northern Ireland less difficult from a technical and administrative point of view. This allowed its supporters to embed it in a wider political narrative of upholding the Belfast Agreement, bringing together the UK and Irish governments, giving the White House a positive story to absorb, and pulling Sinn Féin a little closer into the hallowed centre ground. With regard to the DUP, it was devlishly clever and dual-effect: either the party would regard it as a sufficient concession and therefore agree to restore devolved government in Northern Ireland, or it would force them to say “no” again, despite an attempt to mollify them, and therefore paint them more firmly into the extremism corner. Anyone who knows the DUP will have guessed that it chose the latter.
But we come back to perception versus reality. What has the Windsor Framework actually achieved? In the medium term, very little: the assembly remains in abeyance, an executive cannot be formed, the government of Northern Ireland is in the hands of its senior civil servants, and it is hard honestly to believe that Sir Jeffrey Donaldson will make significant concessions or move his party’s position in the foreseeable future.
In strict constitutional terms, the DUP is absolutely correct. Like the protocol before it, the Windsor Framework imposes an economic border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland that was not previously there. That can be finessed or downplayed or eased under the judicial carpet, but its truth is irrefutable. At the same time, it is absolutely certain that the EU would not allow Northern Ireland to have a kind of associate membership of the single market and the customs union without being able to impose regulatory control in the same way it does over any other part of the single market, which essentially means keeping Northern Ireland within the jurisdiction of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). Those two verities are unavoidable.
There is a third proposal which is often advanced with the certainty of the first two, which is that the creation of a hard land border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland would represent a breach of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. Speaking to Dáil Éireann in April 2019, in his first term as taoiseach, Leo Varadkar again and again linked the Belfast Agreement and the lack of a hard border, emphasising his efforts “to protect the Good Friday Agreement and ensure there is no hard border on the island of Ireland”. This constant elision suggested, but fell fractionally short of saying that a hard border was incompatible with the agreement.
Mary Lou McDonald of Sinn Féin expressed a similar opinion in September 2019, tweeting that “Any checks on the island of Ireland will amount to political vandalism of the Good Friday Agreement”. She added that a hard border “would represent a serious breach of the Good Friday Agreement”. An anonymous European diplomat reinforced the argument: “This avoidance of the hard border, it is not just a desire, it is not just about preferences, it is legal obligation”. As far back as 2017, a European Commission briefing document had referred to the need “to retain the very open border that has been institutionalized in the Good Friday Agreement”.
The difficulty with this line of argument is that it is not true. The Belfast Agreement, perhaps surprisingly, has very little to say on borders, and mostly focuses on institutions like the North/South Ministerial Council, the British-Irish Council and the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference. There is a reference to a commitment by the British government on “the removal of security installations”, which could be taken to refer by implication to some border crossings, and more generally, it is certainly true that in 1998 the direction of travel seemed to be towards less and less stringent border scrutiny between two member states of the European Union. But the agreement itself contains no obligation or requirement in this regard, however convenient a narrative it would be for some parties.
So we have two truths and a fiction with dining rights. And all parties can, as in the Middle East, stress the importance of peace, its desirability, its absolute necessity, and those are worthy ambitions and noble purposes. But they mask the fundamental conflict between unavoidable facts: the DUP will not accept an internal GB/NI border, wherever one might place it; the EU will not accept the absence if an internal border, because if its need to regulate the single market; and many parties will not accept a hard land border on the island of Ireland, even if it is a frank falsehood that it infringes the Belfast Agreement. I have views on all of these scenarios, but right now they are not relevant: the simple acknowledgement of the options is what matters. If these three factors apply, then there cannot be a resolution by which everybody wins, or nobody loses, and these are equally matters which cannot easily be finessed around their edges.
I would argue, therefore, that for any party simply to pray piously for a satisfactory outcome is value-free and an abdication of responsibility. You have to tackle the hard, abutting facts on the ground, and decide, however difficult it is, which you favour. It is all the tougher because these are absolute concepts. Either the CJEU has jurisdiction over Northern Ireland, or it doesn’t. Either there is a border in customs terms between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, or there isn’t. It is simply not possible to find a resolution in which the responses to those questions are “Just a little bit”.
This is not to say that constructive ambiguity has no place in politics or is some great falsehood. The idea was popularised by Henry Kissinger, and of course is a manifestation of the problem I’ve been talking about, the avoidance of hard choices and the perpetuation of unrealisable platitudes. But there’s no doubt that constructive ambiguity can be an invaluable tactic, a means to an end: most of us will have been in a meeting or a discussion or a debate where there is a discrete issue which prevents progress on anything else, and the ability to work around it by making ambiguous statements on it is often a good way to clear blockages.
A very neat example of this kind of ambiguity was used in drafting UN Security Council Resolution 242, adopted in November 1967 in the wake of the Six-Day War. Finding agreement, let alone unanimity, on any issue concerning Israel and its Arab neighbours was almost impossible, but a drafting sleight of hand and the interstices between translations were cunningly employed by Lord Caradon, the UK’s permanent representative. As adopted, the resolution called for the “Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in recent conflict”: note the lack of the definite article, “the territories”, and “the recent conflict” which, although stilted English, left open to interpretation which territories were in question. The French iteration, of course, admitted of no such leeway, referring to “retrait des forces armées israéliennes des territoires occupés lors du récent conflit”. But both were official UN documents, and either could be used depending on one’s purpose.
This kind of opacity cannot, though, be a policy goal. To take the problem of Northern Ireland and the single market, unless one supposes that DUP could be fooled in perpetuity into thinking the Windsor Framework protected the Union while the EU believed its jurisdiction remained valid, we could make progress. But that isn’t a realistic scenario. Sooner or later, the train coming down the track towards us will arrive.
I may have hammered this point home with excessive vigour. Let me try a pithy summation. I have been thinking a lot recently about how we make decisions, both in the context of Whitehall and elsewhere, and what any senior leader really needs is a kind of Jiminy Cricket, an internal voice which forces you to be more systematic and rigorous than any of us wants to be naturally. One of the most important functions this voice can perform is keep us thinking ahead, like a coach who tells us to do just one more lap or circuit. Right, you’ve made that difficult decision, good. That’s impressive. And now what? Because the peak of each decision just unveils the valley before another one. So, for example, if you were Rishi Sunak, feeling quite pleased about agreeing the Windsor Framework with Ursula von der Leyen and receiving plaudits from a range of opinion, you could sit back and open a can of Mexican Coke (it is made with cane sugar rather than high-fructose corn syrup, which is apparently why the prime minister likes it so much). You’ve done a good job.
But being a leader is hard work. You knew that when you signed up. And the truth is that publishing the framework is only the beginning. What’s next? Will it land well with Unionist politicians? In particular, will it persuade the DUP to allow the Northern Ireland Assembly to begin functioning and appoint an executive? You know the party initially welcomed the secretary of state you inherited from Liz Truss, qualified football referee (that must have seemed a good idea) and former chief whip Chris Heaton-Harris, but you also know that the DUP can go off people very quickly, and it can be a cliff edge.
You need focus on the road ahead. What’s next, what’s next? If this doesn’t bring the DUP back into the political fold, if they still refuse to participate—and you know very well that one obstacle is the DUP facing up to allowing a Sinn Féin first minister take office—then where do you go? Which routes are now closed? The EU is unlikely to move further, and realistically it can’t, so if the DUP takes itself out of the equation, you need to wipe the slate clean and see which options are then open. A new set of assembly election? A possibility, but the DUP is unlikely to surge back ahead of Sinn Féin, so that obstacle remains. The result may end up being broadly similar to the outcome in May 2022; in Israel the voters went to the polls in 2015, 2019 (twice), 2020, 2021 and 2022, and these repeated festivals of democracy went little way to solving a political impasse. After a while the electorate simply becomes irritated. If not an election, is there a way to change the rules of the Northern Ireland Assembly so that one party cannot hold the whole process hostage? That would be an obvious and effective (and democratic) solution, but, with a UK general election due no later than January 2025, do you really want to take the façade off Stormont and expose the hidden wiring?
This might seem relentless and ruthless, but this is important. Politicians have to stop deceiving themselves and imagining that saying something enough will make it happen. You need to examine your own preconceptions with brutal candour, and you need to force yourself to look square in the face dilemmas which make Solomon’s infant-related conundrum look straightforward. Every decision has consequences, and sometimes not making a decision is in itself making a decision. So. Now what?
The fundamental problem in Northern Ireland is that the Good Friday agreement was agreed in a context where the UK and Ireland were members of a customs union so there was no customs barrier between the two states. At that time, no one on any side imagined that a day would come when the UK would wish to leave the EU. By leaving the EU, the UK sought to unilaterally impose a fundamental change in the framework on which the Good Friday agreement was constructed.