Thread by @MattCarr55

The EU has never threatened any such thing.
The NI/UK customs ‘border’ was created through mutual agreement in order to avoid jeopardising the Good Friday agreement
Because Brexiters like Steve were too stupid to recognise that their had to be a ‘border’ somewhere

https://twitter.com/SteveBakerHW/status/1304675278258688000

If the UK was going to remove itself from the single market/customs union
Steve and co. hadn’t factored in that this ‘border’ would have to be bet/ NI and the Irish Republic, thereby breaching the Good Friday Agreement, because ‘Brexit means Brexit’ yadda yadda blah blah blah

The Brexiters ignored this till they realised that duh! If you aren’t in something and you leave something there has to be some place where that thing you left begins and ends.

So we got the ‘backstop’ and all the other attempts to avoid a hard border w/ eventually resulted

...in the agreement that Johnson signed and celebrated as a historic breakthrough last year.

To claim that this was ‘imposed’ on the UK in order to break up the union and that it will undermine the NI peace process is epic gaslighting and dishonesty. It’s banana republic stuff

It’s the kind of diplomacy that you might expect from Ruritania. Or Nazi Germany, when Hitler accused Poland of aggression. Johnson either did not understand what he had signed or he understood it perfectly and always intended to renege on it at an opportune moment

Either way it is the most pitiful and infantile and shameful behaviour you could imagine, like a toddler wiping shit on the wall of a playpen. As a negotiating strategy, it’s utterly senseless, except as some psychotic game of diplomatic chicken

It only makes ‘sense’ as a wrecking ball strategy, designed to provoke the EU into walking out of negotiations, thereby enabling Johnson and co to blame it for the No Deal that he and Brexit ultras like Baker have always wanted

Johnson clearly hoping that the U.K. public won’t remember the twists and turns we took to get here, or won’t understand the twisted legalese it’s now deploying, and that ‘unhappy Tories’ will put their careers first

And meanwhile, displaying a barely-imaginable level of cynicism, he accuses the EU of seeking to break up the UK and undermining the Northern Irish peace process!

This is destructive and reckless dishonesty on a scale never seen in U.K. politics

And all of it is being done to gratify the insane fantasies of people like Steve Baker: Wilfully trashing the economy in the midst of a deadly pandemic order to ‘let’s go WTO’ (ffs) while blaming the other side!

All of which makes it incumbent on all opposition parties, on all politicians and members of the public, whether left, right, or centre to unite and oppose this sickening horror of a government and find ways to throw it onto the trash heap of history before it’s too late.

*there*