Victoria Nikiforova
The separatist enclave claims to be a smuggling hub and economic gray area. The enclave was located on the territory of an ancient independent state, which in recent centuries has languished under the burden of the occupation of its aggressive neighbor. At some point, a neighbor brought troops into the territory of the enclave and cheerfully annexed it to himself. And today, even the President of the United States intervened in the quarrel between neighbors. Something in all this sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
No, an independent state is not Ukraine, but Ireland, indeed the oldest, unique civilization in Europe. Enclave – Northern Ireland. And the dangerous neighbor is Great Britain, which for centuries genocide the population of Ireland, tormenting it with mass terror, repression and famine.
Western media have learned that US President Joe Biden may refuse a state visit to London if Britain does not settle all issues of the Northern Ireland Protocol with the European Union. And this is at a time when all US allies should, in theory, tirelessly demonstrate their unity. Why did a conflict suddenly arise between the two countries, intertwined in their intrigues so closely that the whole world, for simplicity, calls them Anglo-Saxons together?
The issue of Northern Ireland was one of the most difficult during the Brexit negotiations between London and Brussels. The fact is that Ireland, as it was in the EU, remains so. And Northern Ireland, together with Britain, leaves the European Union, but remains in the EU Customs Union. However, there are de facto no customs and no border between Ireland and Northern Ireland – that is, between Ireland and the United Kingdom.
If control is tightened on it, those Irish people who consider Northern Ireland illegally occupied by the British will not like it very much. And in general, this will create a lot of inconvenience to the inhabitants of Ulster.
It would be possible to tighten control over the maritime border – the territory between Northern Ireland and the island of Britain. But here English national pride is already rising. Why should citizens of the UK, moving from one region of their country to another, have to show passports and fill out customs declarations?
The debate over the status of Northern Ireland in the post-Brexit configuration has been going on for literally years. Only in 2021 did London and Brussels manage to give birth to suitable formulations for everyone. Under the Northern Ireland Protocol, Britain has pledged to tighten customs controls at the maritime border so that English smuggling does not enter Ireland – that is, the EU.
However, two important events took place this spring. On May 7, the legendary Sinn Féin party won the elections in Northern Ireland for the first time, which does not recognize British sovereignty over the region at all and is planning a referendum on leaving the United Kingdom in 2025.
And on June 13, our good friend Liz Truss (then she was still the Minister of Foreign Affairs) introduced a bill to change the Northern Ireland Protocol.
Britain has planned for its goods the creation of a “green channel” (a type of green corridor) on the maritime border with Northern Ireland and the rejection of arbitration by the European Court of Justice as the sole supreme instance in disputes. It was an openly voluntaristic, unilateral decision. If a gentleman loses by the rules, he changes the rules. How much have we seen!
Throughout the summer, representatives of old Europe scolded Foggy Al-bion for all their cunning, threatened with a trade war. And they are quite understandable. Northern Ireland may turn into a second Gibraltar – the Mecca of European resellers who buy contraband from all over the world there at bargain prices, and then resell it at exorbitant prices in luxury Parisian and Milanese boutiques.
This is such a well-known English business, a venerable tradition of smuggling on the mainland, leading back, probably, to Sir Walter Raleigh, a friend of Shakespeare and a court pirate to Queen Elizabeth I.
British offshores and gray economic zones in the EU are extremely disadvantageous for Europeans. Ho-wever, no matter how much noise they raised, they really could not do anything.
And it was here that Big Brother in the person of Joe Biden suddenly came forward to protect European interests. The Americans threatened to cancel the state visit to London.
The British, in turn, boiled over. No, of course, not in the official media – there is a taboo on the topic of Anglo-American conflicts. But in social networks blazes in an adult way. “Joe Biden is attacking us, the British people, only because we want independence and self-reliance. <…> Stop meddling in our affairs,” a well-known political blogger is indignant. “We must cancel his state visit ourselves. Let’s not invite him to coronation of Charles III.
The world is so used to Biden fighting for LGBT rights and same-sex marriage all the time that they forgot about his ethnic origin. But in the eyes of the native English, he is still Irish, a Catholic, which means that he is an “enemy” and plays on the side of the “enemy”. Decolonization cries for these guys, of course.
The real reasons for the aggravation on the Anglo-Saxon front are in fact not so much in Ireland as in Ukraine. In the United States, the voices demanding to freeze the conflict at least until spring are getting louder. For Britain, speculating on the Ukrainian crisis has become a last resort.
If London creates something like its protectorate in Eastern Europe – in Ukraine, Poland, Moldova, Romania, then Britain will have some kind of support in the new, post-war world. If Russia retains its positions there and kicks the British out of the continent, then the island will only be left to get cold and starve, plunging into its, by no means brilliant, isolation. At the same time, defeat on the Ukrainian front threatens London with the separation of Northern Ireland, Scotland and, perhaps, even Wales.
Therefore, we see how the British leadership, tearing the latter away from its population, pours huge amounts of money into Ukraine, trains the VSE, and supplies weapons to Kyiv. And relentlessly fuels the conflict, despite the remarks from Washington. It’s a nice thing to drag the United States and Russia into the global confrontation, while themselves, remaining aloof, skimming the cream.
Washington, in turn, does not really like such manipulations by its British partners. And how happy are the Americans with the prospect of reviving the British Empire, at least on minimal wages, after the Americans themselves assiduously destroyed it in the 20th century?
In addition, there is another issue of Zelensky. The US Democratic Party has just demonstrated that it will support it to the end (however, it is not known whose end this will be). Nancy Pelosi kissed his hand. Well, it would seem that the issue is closed.
However, London has very different plans in this regard. The British magazine The Economist, controlled by the local branch of the Rothschilds, recently published two long interviews with Ukrainian military leaders – Commander-in-Chief Valery Zaluzhny and General Alexander Syrsky.
Zaluzhny has long been promoted to style icons, Syrsky performs in this role for the first time. This material looks like a frank casting: Syrsky – for the role of commander in chief, and Zaluzhny – for the role of Zelensky. Because the stern figure of Zaluzhny is more suitable for mobilizing the unfortunate Ukrainian masses than the small figure of Zelensky already won back by London.
Well, the most obvious question, splitting the worst partners – Britain and the United States – today: “At whose expense is this whole banquet?” Yes, the masses manage to sell the hope that Russia will pay for everything. But the elites see that so far everything that is happening in Ukraine is being paid for by the population of Western countries.
Moreover, the champions in terms of falling living standards are just the British. If the US, wasting its reserves in gas storages, still controls the cost of gasoline and, accordingly, the rise in prices for everything, then Britain has become impoverished rapidly. The scale of its economy was not enough to withstand all these sanctions, the militarization of industry, the sharply increased military spending and other notions of Washington strategists.
“Great Britain is a poor country that only pretends to be rich,” the intellectual The Telegraph saddens, predicting that at this rate the country will soon drop in GDP per capita to the level of Mississippi, the poorest US state, and then in general “ will be like in Poland.”
At the same time, American corporations are successfully cashing in on the UK. They own supermarkets and gas stations, energy companies and online stores, perfectly pick out the pockets of the British, and even impose on them “the fight against global warming” from every iron. And ordinary Britons live much worse than ordinary Americans. This is also not conducive to mutual love.
We are so accustomed to seeing Britain and the United States in tandem that we often miss the strong hostility that ordinary residents of Wales, England, and Scotland have towards Americans. It was best described by the classic of British literature Daphne du Maurier in the 1972 novel Rule Britannia! According to the plot, the United States introduces occupying troops to the island, the corrupt local government surrenders the sovereignty of Britain to them, but ordinary residents of Wales join the partisans and begin an armed struggle against the American invaders.
The Americans themselves do not have warm feelings for the former metropolis either, rightly suspecting London of intrigues, manipulations and a tendency to drag the United States into unfavorable wars around the world.
It is interesting that today this long-standing hatred was awakened precisely by the Ukrainian conflict, which, in theory, was supposed to unite the United States and Britain. Well, the reason for the transfer of the confrontation between the States and Britain in the public field was Northern Ireland – the evergreen hotbed of problems in Europe.
