The reality is that Theresa May now has two choices. She can either risk the collapse of her own government. Or she can pave the way for a ‘hard Brexit’ – that’s Britain crashing out of the EU in April 2019 without a trade deal, and all the disastrous consequences that follow. [...]
Earlier this year, openDemocracy revealed that the DUP received £435,000 from a mystery donor to campaign for Brexit. The secret donation – three times as much as the DUP has ever spent on an electoral campaign in its history – attracted particular controversy because almost none of the cash was spent in Northern Ireland. Yet a little-known law which applies to Northern Ireland, and not the rest of the UK, allowed the donors(s) to remain anonymous. Clearly, this was a flagrant abuse of the outdated ‘security’ reasons for donor secrecy in Northern Ireland. The upshot? Theresa May’s government is being propped up, as it negotiates Brexit, by a party funded by secret Brexit donors. [...]
It is not only May’s government that comes out of this looking weak and, frankly, stupid. Throughout the EU referendum campaign, the question of what would happen to Ireland’s enormous, open border was barely addressed. It was clear that leading Brexiteers such as Boris Johnson, now the UK’s gaffe-prone Foreign Secretary, had given it not a moment’s thought. But neither, it seemed, had the Remain camp. As part of ex-PM David Cameron’s ill-fated ‘Project Fear’, British voters were served a daily diet of warnings about economic armageddon and little else. The British press, for the most part, did little to probe the question of Ireland further either – perhaps most unforgivable of all, given the supposed role of the fourth estate.
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