Today the General Product Safety Regulations (GPSR) come into force in the EU and here.
GPSR are a new set of EU trade regulations which mean that anyone exporting a range of goods from Britain to the EU, or of course to here, because we’re in the single market, will need an agent to vouch for their safety, costing €150 a year per item.
For many small businesses in Britain it’s the last straw. They’ll stop exporting to the EU or here.
Brexit continues to be the never-ending disaster, but incredibly the DUP still support it.
Like all Europhobes, they claim, absurdly, that it wasn’t ‘done’ properly, though they can’t describe what ‘properly’ would look like.
Various DUP MLAs got the chance on Tuesday evening to display their profound ignorance and hypocrisy about the EU in the debate on the continuance of what the British call the Windsor Framework, but is in reality the Irish Protocol.
Unquestionably the worst speech was from the DUP’s Jonathan Buckley: interminable, repetitive and often plain wrong.
He gave an interview in which he repeated his misunderstandings and non sequiturs for anyone who hadn’t had the misfortune to sit through his ramblings.
He cannot see how illogical it is for the DUP to demand their consent is required for an international trade agreement.
See if you can follow his train of thought. When it’s put to him that voters in the north did not consent to Brexit, indeed strongly opposed and still oppose it, he replies, ah, but it was the whole UK leaving the EU so it wasn’t a matter for the north, or Scotland, so people’s consent here didn’t apply.
Yet he can’t see that when there’s an international trade agreement between the whole UK and the EU (Brexit), the north doesn’t have a right to a say and certainly unionists alone don’t.
First, devolved administrations don’t have a role in international trade agreements and secondly, as Buckley says about Brexit, the EU-UK Trade & Cooperation Agreement (TCA) is a matter for the UK as a whole, nothing to do with ‘democratic consent’ here.
But no: he wants it both ways. The logic of his remarks is that Scotland or Wales should have a vote on the TCA, but that can’t be because it’s the EU-UK TCA. Geddit? He doesn’t.
Do the DUP not realise that the charlatan Johnson only pushed to include a vote for the Stormont assembly in September 2019 because he was concerned that the DUP, using their parliamentary leverage, would oppose him?
He was so desperate “to get Brexit done”, he’d concoct anything. Suckers that they are, the DUP supported him.
We know from Dominic Cummings and various ministers that Johnson didn’t care about the implications (though according to Cummings he “hadn’t a scooby”) of what he was agreeing because he had no intention of abiding by it.
Once he got his majority in December 2019, he cast the DUP into exterior darkness, surplus to requirements. He’d sold them a pup.
The second worst speech on Tuesday was from Emma Little-Pengelly, a whinging panoply of contrived victimhood, repeating some of the ridiculous claims of Buckley and also demanding a non-existent unionist right to give consent to an international treaty.
“It’s only consensus and inclusion if it is a matter that is important to you (like Brexit?) but not if it’s a matter that’s important to unionism.”
Aw, diddums. A thinly veiled attempt to resurrect the unionist veto on any change, lost in 1998.
She should know better than to repeat the canard that the Protocol “causes serious constitutional issues”. Every court in Britain has rejected the case that there are any constitutional implications.
Now, here’s something which will be interesting. There’s a new law going through Westminster called the Product Regulation and Metrology Bill. This will give the UK government the power “to make changes to GB legislation to manage divergence [from the EU] and take a UK-wide approach”, automatically adopting EU rules.
It used to be called ‘dynamic alignment’ and Theresa May’s government (and the DUP) rejected it in 2018.
Passing the new law would mean the EU’s GPSR regulations mentioned above could apply to goods manufactured in Britain.
The question is, will the DUP support it, or do they hate the EU so much they’d rather thole the Protocol?
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