Today is the 10th anniversary of Brexit. You wouldn't know it if you listened to the MSM, especially in Britain where you'd get the "alternate" anniversary. That's why we are here at the Mark Steyn Club - to mark the occasion, provide the ground truth, and speak to the impact.
Lord Frost writes in today's Telegraph:
The EU is "not a democracy" and Britain has now become a "full democracy" after Brexit, according to @DavidGHFrost.
In a major intervention marking 10 years since the referendum, the former Brexit negotiator argues that EU member states lack real political control because key... pic.twitter.com/96ugTSx1al
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) June 23, 2026
Below Mark discusses Brexit and betrayal with SteynOnline friends Phelim McAleer, Baroness Hoey, and Ben Habib - available as today's Topical Take and also on video here.
Mark Steyn: Hey welcome along to the Mark Steyn Show and happy Commonwealth Day to you and yours, whether you're watching from Queen Maud Gulf in the Arctic, or Lord Howe Island in the Tasman, but if you're watching in Cleethorpes or [inaudible] remember this. Yeah, out of the European Union and into the great world beyond to reconnect with all those far flung parts of the Commonwealth, just like the global power Britain used to be.
Do you remember Brexit? It's a long time ago now, more or less seven years since the referendum, June 2016. I happen to be passing through London that night, and I switched on my TV at 10 p.m. to watch the results. And at approximately 10:03 p.m. Nigel Farage came on and said, "I fear we may have come up a little short." And I decided to turn in early because I couldn't face watching hours of smug BBC types like David Dimbleby and Laura Kuenssberg prove him right. And I'd set my alarm....oh there's Laura at her smuggest. And I'd set my alarm clock because I had an early flight to Dublin, so I woke up bleary eyed and remembered oh, yeah Brexit and I clicked on the telly just in time to see the ashen faced and no longer smug Mr. Dimbleby announce that the United Kingdom had voted to quit the European Union. There he is.
And my taxi driver to Heathrow was cock-a-hoop as you would expect taxi drivers to be about the result. And when I got to the airport, the bloke over the tannoy announced "Despite yesterday's vote, all flights to European destinations are leaving as scheduled, which gave a whole last train from Berlin vibe to the terminal. And on the plane the lady next to me and I both accepted the stewardess's offer of a couple of those mini bottles of champagne that they have on British Airways and my fellow passenger correctly deduced there's a reason why you're drinking champers at six in the morning. So after the first sip, she nudged me and said, "Isn't it marvelous?" She was an Irish barrister. And I agreed that it was totally marvelous, and we downed several mini bottles of bubbly before we touched down at Dublin and neither of us had any idea that we were landing on the island that Brussels would use quite cynically, but very effectively, to hollow out and destroy Brexit.
So here we are seven years later, with something called the Windsor Framework agreed by the soi disant president of Europe, Cruella von der Leyen, and the purported British Prime Minister Rishi Rich. For non Britons, Rishi Rich is the chap who lost the leadership election but a month later wound up in Number 10 anyway. That would appear to be a negation of last year's leadership election. But he's since moved on from that to negate additionally, both the 2019 general election and now the 2016 Brexit vote. If you're wondering why it's called the Windsor Framework, well, Rishi and Cruella met in the Fairmont Hotel at Windsor. Fairmont Hotels are pretty variable in my experience, the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa used to be okayish, but they've totally wrecked the Queen Elizabeth in Montreal. But you notice, they're not calling this the Fairmont Framework. Instead, His Majesty the King invited somewhat, constitutionally dubiously, Frau von der Leyen to tea at Windsor Castle, and lent the name of his dynasty to this so called framework.
No, no, I know, if you're one of the apparent millions of people whose sole interest in constitutional monarchy is watching Harry and Meghan telling Oprah and Netflix and People Magazine that all they really want is privacy, then you probably think the Windsor Framework is some sort of portable medical device to support the prince when he's got his next dose of frostbitten todger. There he is frostbitten todger, terrible problem apparently for the Duke of Sussex. But in fact, the Windsor Framework represents the end of Brexit. We're going to talk about that from the Irish end, and the European end and how combined they've wound up squeezing the life out of Brexit.
We've got a terrific panel for you. Baroness Hoey is an Ulster lass born and bred and she served in Tony Blair's ministry, but she is no longer a member of the Labour Party and sits as an independent in the House of Lords.
Phelim McAleer is also from Northern Ireland, County Tyrone. Phelim, did I get that right? He was a cub reporter, I was just working it out, I could just see it on the map. I can see it on the map. He was a cub reporter on the Crossmaglen Examiner, and later the Sunday Times' man in Dublin. Not sure whether that's a promotion or not. He's now a filmmaker and playwright and his latest movie is My Son Hunter, about the son of Joe Biden.
And Ben Habib—we might as well get this out of the way. Ben Habib isn't from County Tyrone or County Antrim where Kate is from, or County Fermanagh, or County Down, or county anything in fact, he's from Sindh in the Indian subcontinent. That's where he was born and for us old school imperialists, Sindh always evokes General Sir Charles Napier's famous if apocryphal one word message back to his superiors after taking the entire province: peccavi. That's a Latin pun; nobody does those anymore because it doesn't get the big laughs on Mock the Week. But Ben was elected as a Brexit Party member of the European Parliament in the 2019 Brexit Party landslide that doomed Theresa May's premiership and he's been a big part of the court challenges to the Northern Ireland Protocol. A few months back on this show I said as a throwaway aside to Kate Hoey that the easiest way to solve the problem of the Protocol was for Keir Starmer's Labour Party to win the election and have England Scotland and Wales join Northern Ireland back in the EU single market.
Well, I got that wrong. You don't need to wait for Labour to win the election because Rishi Rich has pre conceded the issue and put England Scotland and Wales back with Ulster under EU control, or as the Windsor Framework puts it somewhat more subtly. Yeah, there's the key line: "the government needs to ensure that we monitor and tackle risks of regulatory divergence within the UK internal market." In other words if British policy shows any sign of quote "diverging" from the EU, His Majesty's government is pledged to quote tackle it and make it Euro compliant. So much for all that out into the world stuff. Let's start with Ben Habib on this. Ben, is Brexit dead?
Ben Habib: I think it's....well, first of all, Mark, I think Kate would agree with me on this one, we never really got Brexit. That day in June 2016, when we voted, the ticket said, do you wish the United Kingdom to leave or remain in the EU? And we never got the United Kingdom leaving the EU. As we now know, Northern Ireland was captured as we exited the front door. And I know it's not the subject of this debate. But we also signed something called the Trade And Cooperation Agreement which had already pre committed the entire United Kingdom to aligning with EU laws such as they were at 31st December 2020, when we left the single market, in important government policy areas such as state aid, competition, employment, and crucially, the environment, which is putting such a burden on our economy. So we never got Brexit, Mark. And people like Kate and myself and others have been fighting that fight, really, ever since we saw the first draft of the withdrawal agreement. And we could see that we were not getting the clean break that we had been promised. You know, we all remember David Cameron saying, if you vote to leave, we are going to leave the single market, we are going to leave the Customs Union. When Boris Johnson was elected, he promised the country would leave the EU as one United Kingdom; we would take back control of our laws, our borders, our cash and our fish. And actually all those promises have been observed in the breach. So we never really got Brexit. We've been fighting a rearguard action to try and get it over the line. But I think in the way that you've just described Mark, I think we may be losing the fight big time. I fear that we're going to end up in what's called dynamic alignment across the United Kingdom with the EU pretty soon. And then it's a short hop and a skip back into the single market and I think that's the direction of travel.
Mark Steyn: Yeah, it's interesting to me, Kate, because whatever one feels about the EU, their negotiators seem to have been far more wily and strategic. I'm thinking of Michel Barnier. And as I say, whatever you think about him, he correctly identified the point of vulnerability, which was the so called Belfast Agreement. And he figured he could leverage Northern Ireland into basically throttling Brexit in its cradle. Why did London not see that?
Baroness Hoey: Well, I think you're right, Mark, that the European Union very cleverly saw this little gap, this idea of Northern Ireland, keeping them as part of more or less part of the European Union was the way for the future, for the rest of the United Kingdom to be able to come back in again. They were helped, of course, I have to say, by an Irish government that initially under Enda Kenny had accepted that if, you know, when the referendum happened, they would start and work with the civil servants on both sides to work out a system, because of course the reality is Northern Ireland has a border with the European Union, the only part of the United Kingdom that has and that of course gives some necessity to actually look at how that would be handled. But once Varadkar came in as the Taoiseach, the prime minister, he changed that, he stopped the civil service meeting. And really the Irish connived with the European Union to because they liked it, it helped, because it's working towards what we're seeing now, more and more divergence to Northern Ireland businesses having to get their products and move towards working with the Republic of Ireland, whereas 70% of our trade from Northern Ireland was with mainland Great Britain. And that is going to change and, you know, the Windsor Framework isn't going to make any difference to that whatsoever. In fact, it's going to make it go happen even faster.
So our government, the United Kingdom Government, you know, has let down people in Northern Ireland very, very badly. They've done it before, of course, in the past, and you just get the feeling sometimes that at the very top of the UK Government, particularly in the Foreign Office, they really don't want Northern Ireland, you know, they would, they would kind of love to get rid of us, it would be quite nice if we would all accept meekly that we wanted to be to be part of the United Ireland, and I'm afraid for them that what this is doing is actually hardening attitudes in Northern Ireland. That's, you know, that is not going to happen. So I think, I think what upsets me most, of course, is the cleverness of the EU, the stupidity, whether knowingly or not of our own negotiators, that they've ended up coming back with Rishi Sunak, coming to Northern Ireland, going to a factory, and kind of almost dancing around with glee that this was the most wonderful, wonderful thing for Northern Ireland. And of course, giving all those people who want to go back into the single market, a great boost, because he said, look, this is you've got the best deal, you've got the best of both worlds, you've got everything. And of course, immediately that gives those who want to go back saying, well, if Northern Ireland can get it, then why can't the rest of us? So it was a terrible, terrible way of handling it, and people are very, very angry here.
Mark Steyn: Well, it's interesting that Boris Johnson....who I know you have said some good things about Kate, but it's interesting to me. He called himself....he said he preferred the term minister for the Union rather than prime minister and he used to talk up England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales as the so called Awesome Foursome, which is a very good Boris line. But in fact, he's wound up inflicting more damage on the Union than the Prime Ministers far more antipathetic to it, such as a lot of your chums in the Labour Party, Kate.
What do you make of this, Phelim? Do you think it would come as a surprise to Mr. Gladstone to find after all these years that the answer to the Irish question is Michel Barnier?
Baroness Hoey: Well, I think you know, Boris did what he did because he was desperate to get it fixed in the sense of actually getting withdrawal agreements through and therefore being able to say, as he went into the election that Brexit was done, but yes, I mean, I'm as disappointed and angry with him as I am with all UK Prime Ministers. I'm not sure the Labour Party, Keir Starmer, would be very different because he is an absolutely fanatical remainer.
Mark Steyn: Absolutely, Davos man incarnate.
Baroness Hoey: [inaudible] in opposition the Labour Party when they get into government, sometimes that happens.
Mark Steyn: No, no, that's true. And of course, the Labour Party was Jim Callaghan and Harold Wilson, who decided to put the British Army in the service of keeping Northern Ireland in the Union. What do you make of this, Phelim?
Phelim McAleer: Well, I think Leo Varadkar has played a blinder. I think Kate really put her finger on it. The mandarins in the Foreign Office and the elite of Britain, let's be honest, they have more in common with a gay foreign Irish Taoiseach such as Leo Varadkar than they do with Northern Ireland Unionists. They don't understand them. They don't want to understand them. They don't like them. And you know, it was.... they can talk you know, he's the Leave Riker was someone they could talk to. And Leo played the return to violence card very well, you know, the hard border would....the hard border. The problem with the hard border was going to illustrate the weaknesses of the Good Friday Agreement, because the great strength of the Good Friday Agreement was the Unionist one, and probably didn't realize it Sinn Féin lost, but pretended that they didn't. This was going to expose that partition was there. That Sinn Féin were administering British government. So that's why it was it was important for everyone to not have this hard border, it wasn't like a return to violence was going to expose the problems of the Good Friday Agreement. Leo Varadkar played a blinder. And he had people he could talk to in both the Foreign Office and in the European Union and the British government caved.
Mark Steyn: Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. You know, when we talk....we'll come back to the Sinn Féin thing, because that's very interesting to me what you said there, and I think it's correct. But this business with the border. I mean, we marked in December the 100th anniversary of the Irish Free State after its secession from the UK. And so we had the land border on the island of Ireland, which has always been an open border. As you know, we have a Common Travel Area between Ireland and Great Britain. And that's, as Kate has pointed out on the show, that's mostly to the benefit of the Irish. And somehow we accepted the idea that the Irish border is something that is within the province of the European Union. If we had simply ignored the issue, Ben, and we'd had no hard border on the northern side, and the Irish and the EU chose to put up a hard border on the southern side, that's on them. And that would have made everybody mad. And presumably after a couple of weeks of being hassled every time you go and visit your cousin three miles south, it would have gone away. Why did why did London allow it to become an issue?
Ben Habib: I mean, I loathe the term hard border because there was never a suggestion from the UK side as you intimated, Mark, that there would be any border infrastructure at our end. In fact the British government repeatedly said there wouldn't be. And there's there was no reason for the EU to erect any customs posts either. There's a report that the EU published in November 2017, which talks about a smart border on the island of Ireland, and concludes that it's a very viable option. And in fact, if you listened to what Maroš Šefčovič is now talking in relation to the Irish Sea border, when he talks about making that border invisible, it's the same kind of technology that they were talking about back in 2017. And the same kind of arrangements like Trusted Trader status, and all that kind of thing.
So the hard border, the name, the hard border, the notion that there would be a hard border was the creation of the Republic, supported by the EU in order—and I use this word advisedly—to weaponize, literally to weaponize the border issue in favor of the European Union. There was never any prospect of a hard border on the island of Ireland. And I think the British government bought it, because Theresa May was and is a Remainer. You've seen her recently in the Commons. I don't know if anyone on this in this program watched the clip when Bill Cash mentioned the importance of sovereignty recently, in the Commons, she actually shook her head in disbelief that Bill Cash would be banging the drum of sovereignty. And, you know, they hold British sovereignty almost antipathetically. They're all for Ukraine's independence and sovereignty, but for some reason, they go weak at the knees when they have to stand up for the United Kingdom. And I think she welcomed the weaponizing of the Irish border, because it gave her the opportunity to strike a deal with the EU that held us very close to the EU, effectively keeping the entire United Kingdom in the EU single market. You remember the famous backstop that she created, designed to neuter Brexit. So this was a debate that she welcomed, I think, the notion of a hard border, well, it gave her the political ammunition that she needed to get the end result that she wanted, which was effectively to, you know, strangle Brexit before it was even delivered.
Baroness Hoey: I don't think we can forget that the importance of how the Good Friday Belfast Agreement was used in all of this as the great shibboleth that you know, could not be touched. And that was why the question of the border was always brought in and the terrible thing was there was huge ignorance, certainly in the UK Parliament, about actually what the Belfast Good Friday Agreement said. And we all know that it didn't say anything about borders, it actually talked about getting rid of the you know, the infrastructure, military posts that were there and all of that. But you know, this idea, then Theresa May said oh, we couldn't even have a camera there, not knowing that they're actually cameras there watching people, you know, speeding and all kinds of things. So the Belfast Good Friday agreement has been completely taken over by people who didn't understand that of course it's the 25th anniversary coming up in April. And that's why there's the desperation, the desperation to get Stormont back because, you know, the DUP pulled out in Stormont, because they want your president, well not your president, the president of the United States to come and visit.
Mark Steyn: Yeah no though, there's things like Joe Biden, actually who shouldn't be a factor in this actually have become a factor. But you know, the point to me, I mean, we're talking about it, Phelim in a very reasonable way, as if, as if the United Kingdom and the European Union are engaged in a good faith negotiation. 20% of the EU's entire border checks now occur in the Irish Sea, between England, Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland. Now, the EU has 27 members, and they border Turkey, which is a big source of refugees, and they border Ukraine, which is a war zone, and they border Russia, against whom they're supposedly operating a punitive sanctions regime. But all these 27 other countries, between them, these 27 other countries don't have anything like the border checks that are going on if you send something from Edinburgh to Belfast, they're not gonna....
Ben Habib: And remember, we're still in the grace period. We're still in the grace period.
Mark Steyn: Oh, no, that's right. But this isn't a good faith negotiation. This is a punitive thing to teach you British people, you're screwed, because you voted for Brexit.
Phelim McAleer: Funny one of my first jobs for the Crossmaglen Examiner was a story that I discovered about when the free trade was open between the North and the South as part of the EU Free Trade Agreement, must have been early 90s. And the story was that there was a couple of hundred people called customs agents. And these were private entrepreneurs who had a porta cabin on one side of the border. And I remember lorry drivers going in with a form and they would do something on the computer, they would get the form from this private agent and drive through with this piece of paper. Now that was back in the 90s. That was what the border was then. And then they were all going to lose their jobs. My story was hundreds of mostly women were going to lose their jobs because the customs agents will be out of work with the free trade. But that was the extent of the hard border. Now there was obviously the security hard border—that was a different matter. But there was no there was no hard border. You know, you could drive between Crossford Lane and Dundalk often and many people did with goods in that. But you know, there was no hard border and now with computers, with the internet, it was going to be almost....I mean, people, they can stop loiterers going into Madison Square Garden because of facial recognition. Right? You're telling me that they need a massive hard infrastructure to organize a better trade between, you know, barcodes, and that? It was false. It was scare mongering, and it was designed to strong arm the British and they were willing, they were willing.
Mark Steyn: Yeah, that comes back to the point you're making, Kate. I mean, if you were looking at this as a fair fight between London bureaucrats and Brussels bureaucrats, it would be one thing. But you seem to be suggesting that basically ever since the morning after Brexit, ever since David Dimbleby did his ashen faced announcement, that in fact, the permanent British state has been working to kill Brexit.
Baroness Hoey: I was actually sitting with David Dimbleby in that studio that morning when it happened and was there when David Cameron came out. You know, he resigned and you said what you said about David Dimbleby was so right, because I think he was just absolutely shocked, as the whole establishment were but yes, I think...you know, we have to be honest, the vast majority of the kind of establishment, the senior civil servants, the judges, the academics, you know, all those universities that were getting European Union money, they were all absolutely devastated when we voted to leave. And I think they began to believe their own kind of rhetoric that, you know, this was...they could get back in again and the lot went quiet for a while. I mean, we had those three years in Parliament, where particularly Keir Starmer, now leader of the Labour Party did his best to slow it up, stop it, and stop the actual Referendum Bill being implemented. So there's no doubt about it. I think the problem too, about Northern Ireland is that, you know, for many, many years before the Troubles, Northern Ireland was ignored by the rest of the United Kingdom and by the UK Parliament. And then when the Troubles came, of course, there was a lot of interest and they had to put soldiers in, and we know the whole history of that. And then Tony Blair got the, you know, the agreements through and that was supposed to be the end of it all. And I just think that there is a kind of feeling around in Parliament, even amongst some of the most fervent leavers, that somehow Northern Ireland, well, you know, it's just, it's only a little bit. And let's, you know, we don't want to spoil it for the rest of us. But of course, what the Framework document now is doing is actually spoiling it for the rest of the United Kingdom. And it's not really now a Northern Ireland issue, this should be a serious issue for all of those people who voted to leave because this is the opportunity now, you know, it's riddled the framework document when you read the legal texts riddled with things that are going to make it very, very easy now for us to go back in to the EU. And even if we don't go back in, we will be under their rules. And that's why so much of what's in the document is just complete and utter exaggeration and overhype as to how good it is.
Mark Steyn: Yeah, I don't think Keir Starmer and the remainers actually want to take Britain back into the EU, because it's one thing to be back in the EU with a seat at the table, and you're one of the 28 voting members, and you have your commissioners and all the rest of it. But this way for the remainers it's the best of both worlds, you're subordinate to the EU. I don't want to go back to Sindh province, Ben, but I think the example, the comparison I always make is with the princely states in British India, you're not actually formally part of His Majesty's dominions, but you have no say whatsoever in diverging from the principles of English law and English rule. And so you'll you become a kind of pathetic....I mean for Brussels it's win win. Britain hasn't left the EU, but it's maintained as a kind of ramshackle protectorate of it.
Ben Habib: It's effectively why the US rebelled against the United Kingdom, it's taxation without representation. That's what we've got in Northern Ireland, we're gonna soon have that right across the United Kingdom. It's an absolute affront to democracy. Democracy has been absolutely turned on its head by successive Tory governments. I blame the Tories because they've been in office, they gave us the referendum, and they refused to implement the result. They gave us a deal with the EU that allowed us to be sucked back into it. And I remember back in 20...I remember it well, because it sent Sophy Ridge into shock. I was on Sophy Ridge during the election. And she said, so what do you think of the withdrawal agreement? And I said, well, I think it's worse than remain, because actually, we're going to be hitched at the hip to the EU. And we would have given up our vote; we would have given up our say, in all the institutions. We will optically have Brexit, but we will be stuck in this kind of lunar orbit. And we've been stuck in lunar orbit, make no mistake, we're getting closer to the EU. But we've been stuck in lunar orbit around the EU ever since 31, January 2020, when we notionally left the organization, and you know, and as you say, Mark, their negotiating tactics have not been in good faith. They've absolutely run us ragged. And I think that is significantly down to the fact that so many people in our government and our institutions, as Kate said, want to go back into the EU. Democracy as I began, this little segment with has been turned on its head and abused.
Mark Steyn: Yeah, that's one way of looking at it. I think you're right, we have to just blame the Conservatives. In a sense, Barnier and co made no secret of what they were doing. Why do you think....Phelim, I mean, I take what you say about Varadkar and all the rest of it. But in a sense, it's not.....the normal position for a Dublin government after this vote would have been surely to make sure that you were aligned with your closest neighbor and that the benefits you enjoy from that, you know, being able to move to London and vote to make Keir Starmer Prime Minister or whatever. There's a lot of benefits to Dublin from that arrangement, but they figured....they seem to get that London wasn't serious and they could just drive a coach and horses through the whole thing.
Phelim McAleer: Yeah, they sense the weakness but also don't underestimate the anti Englishness that runs through the Irish establishment and the Irish popular culture. It's truly shocking to me, you know, and it's a weird thing the anti English but half their families are in England, they have a kind of a love hate relationship, the media has this obsession with being better than English. That's why they're always voting for all these progressive ideals to show themselves as better than the English. So yes, you would think that...I mean, correct Ireland and England. I mean, Ireland has done so well with the free trade and the free movement to England, but they sensed this weakness, they sensed a popular thing to do, culturally they were happy with it, and it wouldn't be the first time that they did something for popular short term gain even though it's against their long term interests, which it may be, but not with these, not with the way the British government caved. Definitely at the moment, they're on the top step. And it has worked out well for them because of the weakness of the British government.
Mark Steyn: Let me ask you a follow up point on that thing about the Irish establishment though, because the Brexit years have also been, to a certain extent the Sinn Féin years in Irish politics, north and south, and it is, I mean, again, whatever you feel about Sinn Féin, they're incredibly clever. I happened to be in Dublin on the day of the last election and I was walking around seeing all these political posters showing you know people from many lands, ladies in hijabs and all the rest of it. And I thought what the hell party is that? It was actually Sinn Féin. I thought what's going on there? Is Tony Blair running Sinn Féin now? It's completely the opposite. North of the border they're a conventional Irish nationalist party, south of the border they're running as this weird multiculti Blairite thing. Which is the real Sinn Féin and in fact does it matter? Is the inauthentic Sinn Féin just going to clean up anyway?
Phelim McAleer: Sinn Féin will be whatever you want it to be. Look when I was growing up, Sinn Féin all us lefties, we were all against the EU. That was what we believed, at the Nice referendum Sinn Féin and the left defeated that and then they were forced to have another referendum. So Sinn Féin will be whatever you want it to be, you know, and they are allied with the European Union in Dublin. And during the Troubles they were allied with the Democrats in America, or even right wing anti Irish Americans, they allied with anyone, Gaddafi, to Russia, wherever, you know, my enemy's enemy is definitely my enemy and England's difficulty. I mean, remember that phrase, England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity. That was that was what propelled the Easter Rising forward. It's continued to this day.
Baroness Hoey: Mark, I'm just going to say on that, you know, you can't underestimate the very, very large numbers of Irish, second, third generation in mainland Britain. And even in Parliament. You know, I'm always struck by how many MPs and peers, you know, you're chatting to them, and they say, oh, yes, my granny came from so and so or, yes, my, you know, there's a huge involvement there. And, I mean, I'm not saying they're all sort of Irish Republicans, but you know, you can't, you can't dismiss that, it's actually there. There's quite a lot of people who have this sort of romanticized idea of Ireland and wouldn't it be nice if it was united?
Mark Steyn: Yeah, I remember years ago, a documentary on the BBC. It was about the July 12. It was about it was basically about the Irish....I think it was a documentary on the Irish border. But they showed, you know, Unionists marching on July the 12th. And the BBC guy then turned to camera and said, some of us.... you know, they were doing....they had all the pipes and the guy turned to the camera and goes, "Some of us wish the Unionists would just pipe down." And that was true, I think, that was basically true throughout the 70s, 80s, 90s. And then the situation stabilized. And the London establishment now wishes, the Unionists would just pipe down again, don't you think Ben?
Ben Habib: Absolutely. I have had so many debates with ostensible Brexiters who say exactly that, that the Unionists in Northern Ireland need to pipe down. And what is Brexit if it isn't the union, putting the union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland first and foremost in our thinking and making policy and national interest, and, you know, for them to champion Brexit, these, what I would call the Tory Brexiters, who I think, pose a bigger threat to Brexit, frankly, than some of our clearer enemies do. You know, what is it in them that allows them to throw parts of the country under a bus in order to get Great Britain to not even the place that they would wish to go? It's a complete breakdown of political will in our establishment, that they would take this approach that unionists should pipe down. The only real lovers, as far as I can see, not the only real, the biggest lovers of the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland are in Northern Ireland. And one of the things I've been saying in the press, and, you know, anyone who listens, is that actually, the Unionists need to come out of Northern Ireland, they need to stop being under siege in Northern Ireland, they need to break out of their straitjacket. And they need to bring unionism and all its optimism and all that can be delivered through unionism to Great Britain and remind the English in particular, why it's so important that Great Britain and Northern Ireland should stand together as one United Kingdom, and I plead with Jeffrey, stop being a provincial party, start thinking nationally. The drawback that Jeffrey has, sadly, the DUP have, in particular, Jeffrey has on his shoulders, is that the existential threat to the United Kingdom falls to him to defend, and it should be no provincial party's responsibility to protect that which all British citizens should take for granted, the integrity of our country. I mean, can you imagine the American reaction if there was a force within the mainstream political establishment to hive off Alaska. You know, people would be up in arms, but this is going on in this country, and we need unionism to be felt positively across the UK, the government and the Tory Party again, sorry, I come back to that, they've got to stop telling unionism to pipe down, and they need to understand the benefits of the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Mark Steyn: Phelim, I want to pick up on the essence of what Ben said there because that's true, quite cynically, the political establishment in London decided that in order to get Brexit done or to appear to have been done, they sacrifice Northern Ireland. They sacrifice Northern Ireland, and have discovered that in fact that was like, the non Trojan horse that scuttled Brexit for everyone else too, so they didn't even get anything for sacrificing Northern Ireland. They've lost Brexit. They sacrificed Northern Ireland and lost Brexit anyway.
Phelim McAleer: Yeah, yeah. I think Ben....just to follow on from what Ben was saying, you know, this is a nightmare for Unionists. They have been sacrificed. I mean, just to follow on with the Trojan metaphor there you know, the need to beware of Greeks bearing concrete lanes on motorways. [Everyone laughs] They are lovely concrete lanes. I mean, listen, my family have a lot of concrete, there's a lot of concrete lanes but you know, there's a price to be paid for a free concrete lane and a free motorway. And this is a unionist....this is almost like an existentialist nightmare for unionists and they're not naturally an outgoing people either culturally or personally, you know, they're very taciturn you know, to quote Seamus Heaney, whatever you say, say nothing, and he was totally talking about Northern nationalists. Northern Unionists are very quiet, they're just culturally not.....I mean, you look at...if you're an Irish nationalist, Irish dancing, Irish music, it's celebrated across the world, Riverdance. You know, the big stars of Northern Ireland unionism, George Best, Van Morrison, you know, they're all uncomfortable in their own skin to a certain extent and create great art because of that, by the way. Better than a lot of Northern nationalist art, which is just propaganda, just propaganda or, you know, the best nationalist music for the last 50 years is Shane MacGowan and the Popes and he was London Irish, you know? So he saw his nationalist culture and did something different with it. So, you...
Mark Steyn: That's actually interesting. I mean I would have thought in a sane world, Riverdance would be a dispositive argument against the United Ireland, now and forever. So I take your point on that. But isn't it....well, here's the here's the problem....what struck me about Northern Ireland since the Belfast Agreement when you went there, is life seemed....not only life was more normal, but life in Belfast as a reasonably normal British city. It seemed to me that it was more.....everything was more normal than it had been for the 30 years previously. Now, the European Union have put their put their foot on the scale, and are basically destroying that agreement and tipping Northern Ireland into the south without any so called cross border agreement or whatever. The perversion, you know, the Belfast agreement is sacrosanct. But Brussels are the ones who basically torn it up and turned it into something else.
Phelim McAleer: Yes, yes. But are Unionists strong enough? Do they have the political or cultural expertise or willingness to go out and fight? Will people listen to them? You know, these are big questions. And you know, we will see what the answer is. But you're right this is destabilizing, but, you know, I think they made a calculated decision. It's better to destabilize unionism than nationalism, and they want to punish the British government for Brexit and the British people for Brexit. So a bit of destabilization is not the unintended consequence, it's the intended consequence.
Ben Habib: Michel Barnier repeatedly used to say when I was in the European Parliament, the price of Brexit will be Northern Ireland. That was back in 20... This is this is part of a preconceived plan. This is not an accident. It hasn't just happened because, you know, Leo Varadkar did something and it snowballed and it got out of hand. This has been, you know, very well thought through, these guys have negotiated the British government into a cocked hat. And, you know, the other point, just picking up on what Phelim was saying about the Northern Irish unionists being taciturn and introverted and unprepared to come out of their backwaters as it were. The other point is that there's no votes for the Labour Party or the Tory party in Northern Ireland. They don't get any MPs from there, so they don't really give a damn about the electorate in Northern Ireland. And that's another reason.... I'm just going to go back to this point once again, because I think it's very important. It's another reason why the DUP and other Unionist parties need to come to the mainland, they cut they've got to break this natural desire to be introverted and to stay out of the mainstream. They've got to be optimistic. They've got to come to the mainland, they've got to make their arguments, they've got to threaten the Tories, in particular, in their backwater. We need to electorally threaten the Tories. And only then I think, is there a chance of them listening to the case.
Mark Steyn: Are you calling....I just want to make sure I've understood Ben here. Are you actually calling for the DUP to run candidates in say, marginal Conservative seats?
Ben Habib: I'm calling to them to either do that or to ally with a party that will do that, and to target particular seats where there may be Northern Irish diaspora, but definitely marginals. Hit the Tories where it hurts; make sure that they know that this has electoral ramifications for them. This is not just some backwater provincial issue that they can turn their back on, that they better wake up and smell the coffee and, and recognize the threat that the DUP and other unionists, there are lots of unionists by the way in England and I describe it as rather secular by comparison, but of course it is. But a lot of unionists who will rally to the cause. You know, whenever you mention...whenever I mention in a campaign speech or whatever, the importance of the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the importance of the United Kingdom, I get massive cheers. People want it. People want to champion the United Kingdom. They're sick and tired of this political establishment, being prepared to throw our sovereignty under a buck. If Ursula von der Leyen....I'm kind of slightly digressing. But Ursula von der Leyen talks about pooled sovereignty as if it's some kind of evolutionary progression of nation states, that they should give up this insular backward looking belief in themselves as being the important sovereign unit and actually go for this pooled sovereignty across Europe. And our political establishment, I think has bought into that. And they see unionism as parochial and backward. And that way of thinking has to change and the only way to do it is through the ballot box.
Mark Steyn: Well, that's a very weird way of putting it because the post 1922 settlement was a kind of pooled sovereignty between....right from the inception of the Irish Free State, it was accepted that even though it was a separate country, it would have the right to send its people to live in Liverpool and Manchester and vote. The Earl of Gowrie sat in Mrs. Thatcher's cabinet as an Irish peer traveling on an Irish passport. There's plenty of pooled sovereignty within the British Isles without having to take lessons from Ursula von der Leyen. What do you make of that idea that the DUP need to go national, as it were, Kate?
Baroness Hoey: Well, I think I think we need to remember, you know, when we're talking about the way unionism has behaved, we can't forget that for 30, over 30 years, people from the pro union community really were under siege here in Northern Ireland, and the terrible, terrible atrocities that happened. And then of course, there was some kind of atrocities on the on the other side. And when the Belfast Good Friday Agreement came, I think people really genuinely you know, they, they had to really struggle to go in and support something that was actually allowing terrorists to walk free and all of that, but they did it because they genuinely thought that that was the end of the issue, you know, really forever, because the Republic of Ireland had given up its claim on Northern Ireland, that was very, very important. And the Belfast Good Friday Agreement was meant to bring stability. And of course, what really only gradually has been seen now is that the Belfast Agreement actually wasn't meant to be the end, it was only a staging post. And that's why people from the nationalist side always talk about the peace process. It was a process. And the only ending for nationalists is a process which ends in a United Ireland. And Brexit, of course, has meant that some of that has been brought into you know, a sharper focus. But I think unionists do that I, you know, coming back now to live here, which I haven't been, obviously, all the time I was in Parliament. I am concerned that, you know, they haven't been outreaching enough, that they haven't been pushing their ideas and their aims and the strength of the union and why we need the union much, much more. It's been kind of taken for granted. And I think that that's going to have to change. I think that would be interesting. I don't think the DUP could cope with standing actually in seats, but they could align themselves with perhaps some of the other parties. But in the meantime, of course, they're under huge, huge pressure, the whole establishment in Northern Ireland, and the whole of the media practically, are just simply saying the Framework document is great. Now, unionism must go back into Stormont. And the problem is that they have these seven tests, none of the seven tests have been met, perhaps one has, and they're stuck with this thing that they are now going to be presented by everybody in the establishment, both in Great Britain and here, as been typical unionism, they always say no, and it's really, really unfair. I'm hoping that, you know, some of the members of the ERG, which I know Ben doesn't have much time for in Parliament, but they actually do speak out against the framework document, because it isn't, it hasn't changed things. It's made things worse, but you know, there isn't a lot of sympathy on the mainland for unionism, because they're always unionist, they're always presented as being these darn negative figures who go around, you know, beating drums on the 12th of July and it's really, really very unfair. And I know that, you know, Phelim knows that, that people in Northern Ireland, there's so much more in common in Northern Ireland between, you know, Northern Ireland unionists and Northern Ireland nationalists, than there is between Northern Ireland nationalists and the Republic of Ireland.
Phelim McAleer: Oh, totally, totally.
Baroness Hoey: Yeah. So, we're where we are with this.
Mark Steyn: Well, let me ask you about that, Phelim, because, you know, there's peril for the south here too, isn't there? You've got as far as I can tell, you know, every young person in the south supports Sinn Féin. They don't have any memory of when the IRA was blowing the legs off grannies at bus stops. That's not something that is conscious to them. But they seem to think that Sinn Féin are cooler than the two Irish Civil War legacy parties and it's not....and although the legacy parties are holding off Sinn Féin, whether they'll be able to do that after the next election is not clear to me. So are we actually looking at some kind of Sinn Féin victory in Ireland?
Phelim McAleer: Very, probably....possibly, you know, it's got...it seems to be as Kate put it, it's a process. And it's a long march through both countries for them. And you know, and it's a bit like how does Sinn Féin power? Very slowly and then very quickly. I mean, I agree that northern nationalists have more in common with their Protestant neighbors than they have with the south. I remember moving to Dublin in 1998. And I wrote a column at the time saying, I never realized how Protestant I was until I moved to Dublin. I found it very difficult to adjust to the south.
Mark Steyn: Yeah. I remember you telling me you had no idea what St. Stephen's Day was and that kind of thing.
Phelim McAleer: I turned up for work on St. Patrick's Day, because you know, it was it was just another day up north, really, it may have changed a little bit now but you know, I just want to say yes, unionists have been under siege. And I wasn't....I was talking about them culturally, I wasn't criticizing them. I'm just saying, that's the way it is. And it's one of their better points is their modesty and humility. And I also want to put this firmly on the record, I was not celebrating Riverdance, I was merely pointing out that it is celebrated. Personally, I think any country that created Riverdance should be barred from its place among the nations of the world. But that's my belief, but the reality is Irish nationalist culture is celebrated across the world, unionist culture is not, and it's got a difficult place in the world, and for them to come out of those shells is going to be difficult. So, yes, and Sinn Féin...
Mark Steyn: I might as well chip in, I mean I think Irish culture, which thrived under the UK till 1922, has basically, you know, gone down the toilet in the century since and I think that's, that's an interesting question of in and of itself. But one thing you do know, when you go round, say, Waterford, you know, go around any town in the south, and you'll occasionally come across an Orange Lodge that is now a, you know, an abandoned building, or it's been turned into a gay nightclub or whatever, but it's not an Orange Lodge anymore. And so you have these visible architectural signs of a once vibrant tradition that has entirely died. Do you think we are in fact on the verge of a kind of hinge moment that a unionism will get so demoralized not only by what Brussels has done to it, but by as we've talked about the indifference of London, that it ceases to be a viable tradition up north as it once was in Waterford?
Phelim McAleer: Well, no, there's a demographic change too and Queen's University when I was at it in the 80s, late 80s, was very nationalist, administration was unionist but the student body was nationalist. Now it's become I believe, a very nationalist university and the administration has changed also. So I think a lot of unionist children are going to places like Scotland and England for university. No, I don't haven't seen any studies on that. But just anecdotally, I believe that's happening and when you go to England or Scotland, you generally don't return you know, unless like kid comes back later in life. But you know, you know, as Kate will say, there's lots of Northern Ireland youngsters over there, and I'm a lot of them are from unionists traditions. So the demographics are not good for unionists in Northern Ireland. So I think there's a possible existential crisis for unionism and, nationalism is definitely on the rise north and south and it's a different kind, it's not like American nationalism, or the Brexit nationalism, although it has some of the similar characteristics and Sinn Féin why they put up the posters of the woman with the hijab in Dublin on the doorsteps of Limerick they're talking about too many refugees and Ireland is full, but they're talking about it under their breath to try and keep their base happy.
Mark Steyn: Let's open it out in the final minutes, Ben. If we are to assume that the Windsor Framework represents a victory of the EU over a prodigal son, what does that mean for the future of the European Union? If they can cow and crush a great power, one of the big five at the UN Security Council, one of the G7, the imperial metropolis of the Commonwealth on this Commonwealth Day. If they can do that to the UK, what chance does Slovenia have?
Ben Habib: Well, I think the trajectory of global politics is bad. You know, we talk about unionism in Northern Ireland being under threat; actually, a belief in the United Kingdom itself across the United Kingdom is under threat. You know, our values are continually attacked, our heritage is attacked. Our belief in our great historical figures is attacked. Our language is hijacked, women are men and men are women. Everything is being undermined at the moment. And I don't think this is, again, some kind of coincidence, I think there's a full on attack on liberal democratic Western countries. And the United Kingdom is in a maelstrom of that attack and the EU, it seeks the EU for this attack to continue because as member states give up their sovereignty, give up their self determination. The EU takes on that authority, it empowers itself. The EU is basically an antagonist to its own member states; it wants to soak up power. It's an organism that wishes to grow and that organism can only grow if its tributaries if you'd like, feed it, you know, it's feeding like some sort of vampire squid on its member states, and I think it's a really deeply distressing trajectory that, you know, the whole geopolitical direction of travel is awful for liberal Western democracies at the moment, I think we're under real attack. And it's not just this kind of thing but you know, this whole environmental net zero, the economic emasculation that follows from all of that. It's all terrible, I fear more now and you know, than I've ever feared for the direction of travel of our country. It's terrible. I don't know how else to put it, Mark. I think we're in really dire straits.
Mark Steyn: Well, those are all things that are more easily done at a supranational level, because then basically, local politicians can just say, oh, that's above my pay grade, as it were, it's all being decided elsewhere.
Ben Habib: That's against democracy.
Mark Steyn: Yeah, no, that's it is. What I find interesting, Kate, is you spent most of your political life in a party which was the most antipathetic to the union. You know, the Conservative and Liberal parties at least had folk memories of when every seat in the entirety of Ireland was won by either a Conservative or a Liberal MP. It was part of their history. Labour had many....Labour was indifferent to the Union at best, and then you have hardcore fellows like Jeremy Corbyn, who to all intents and purposes, are on the same side as the hardest hardcore types in Sinn Féin and the IRA. What's changed, though, is that when Phelim was referring to the way Sinn Féin used to be anti EU, we now have basically people who are hostile to the union and fanatically pro EU at the same time. I mean, that appears to be a lethal combination as far as opposing them goes.
Baroness Hoey: Yes, I don't think we can put any confidence in Labour changing some of the terrible things that Ben has so, you know, articulately outlined about what's happening globally, I don't think...I think the main aim of a Labour Government will be to be as close as possible to the EU, to, you know, become seen as the party that actually is modern, is progressive is wanting to change things. You know, they'll want to change, probably look at the whole way the Constitution's run, and all of that. I think, where they will be quite strong still is on Scotland, which of course you never can really divorce Northern Ireland from Scotland, the two things are kind of linked very, very much in terms of what happens to Northern Ireland would affect Scotland and what happens to Scotland in terms of independence would affect Northern Ireland. But you know, Tony Blair did change the Labour Party policy on Northern Ireland, because until he came in as Prime Minister, the policy was that Labour would campaign for a united Ireland, and Tony Blair did get that change to recognize that it was up to the people of Northern Ireland, and that they of course led to the Belfast Agreement. But I don't think that we're going to be any safer as a country in terms of our future and the future of the Union by having a Labour government than we have under the Conservatives. And I'd feel sometimes just as just as depressed as, you know, Ben does about the future. The only thing I would say is that I hope, I think what will happen at the next general election is that the turnout will be incredibly low, because I think people are really disillusioned with politics and politicians. And unless there's a new radical party, you know, that is there speaking up for the Union. You know, we are in real difficulty, but I would hope that there could be some new alignment in politics, which is going to put the Union first. Now, that's a lot of work and a lot of change. And people are very conservative with a small c and traditionally they'll vote the way they've always voted, except occasionally when we saw it in the red wall seats. So I don't think anyone should look to Labour as being anything other than more of the same, probably even worse.
Mark Steyn: Well, we've talked about this issue, mainly from the point of view of Brussels, Belfast and Dublin, so we've accepted the reality, as it were, of what's happened, which is that England, Scotland and Wales have just been squeezed from both the Brussels end and from the Irish end, but how would you feel, Phelim if you were an Englishman, a Scotsman or a Welshman who had voted for Brexit and here we are seven years later? What would your take on Brexit be?
Phelim McAleer: I don't....I mean, people who voted for Brexit have been shortchanged. They don't appear to have it. And, you know, people are, are trying to tell them that Brexit is here, but it seems...I think Kate is right, disillusionment. You know, the one....remember the run up to Brexit, it's a different voting system, every vote counts, because so many times people in the UK vote, and their vote doesn't count, because a lot of the seats are safe seats. There's only 100 marginals, Kate could probably correct me, 100 or 150 marginals, but most votes in the United Kingdom don't count. The only the only time they counted was in the referendum when every vote was as important as the other person's vote. And they went out and they took it very seriously. And there was a big turnout. And they were very dutiful. And they had the bids and all that. And they voted for something, and now they've been told that their vote didn't count, and that they're fools and they're idiots and they don't understand. And there's greater, you know, they don't have ideas. We they have all the ideas. And so I think Kate's right, there'll be a very low turnout in the next election. And you see that actually, even in I think, in the United States, too, that there's been lower turnouts, because the people saw nothing changed. The deep state is still running the show.
Mark Steyn: Yeah, that's, that's the thing. You know, Kate, people have said, the whole justification for what we've been talking about is that the EU says, oh, you know, the whole of Ireland is a powder keg, it could go up at any minute if we in Brussels don't impose what we want on it. Isn't the danger actually, that if you if you teach, you know, tens of millions of people on the British mainland, that democracy doesn't matter that and if you teach millions of people on the European continent that democracy doesn't matter, you're likely to have all kinds of new terrorist groups, figuring out that violence is the only way anything changes. Kate, don't you think that's as likely a lesson from the Brexit message?
Baroness Hoey: You know, I was part of the campaigning in those red wall seats and people just were so enthusiastic that they knew their vote mattered. And if I feel the way I do about it all night, I can imagine how many of them feel and how, you know, just think well, what is the point? What is the point of going out and voting for these people who never stick? They didn't even stick to sticking to wanting to get it actually over the line, never mind make a success of it. So yes, I think there is a real concern about the future of how people will react when they realize that once again, that what they wanted has been deliberately stopped.
Mark Steyn: Well, that's a disturbing note, in many ways, but it is true that if you teach people that democracy doesn't matter, there are consequences to that. Thank you very much Lady Hoey and Messrs Habib and McAleer.