Fintan O’Toole: Jacob Rees-Mogg, great satirist of our times

The performance artist who created and sustains the absurd persona called Jacob Rees-Mogg is one of the great satirists of our times. He carries off with great conviction a unique blend of English comic prototypes: Warren Mitchell's Alf Garnett and Al Murray's Pub Landlord seamlessly combined with PG Wodehouse's Gussie Fink-Nottle and Monty Python's Upper Class Twits.

His latest burlesque, delivered this week with his usual deadpan aplomb, was on the subject of how Britain should show Brussels who’s boss in the Brexit negotiations by threatening, of all things, Irish beef.

“If,” he warned, Britain “were to apply the common external tariff on Irish beef, the Irish agricultural industry is in serious trouble. You’ve got to ask the EU: does it want to sacrifice the economy of Ireland on the altar of EU ideology? My guess is that the answer is no, and therefore we are in a very strong negotiating position.”

What makes Rees-Mogg so clever is that his most ardent admirers take him for a real person and his pronouncements for real strategies

What makes Rees-Mogg so clever, of course, is that his most ardent admirers take him for a real person and his pronouncements for real strategies. This idea that Ireland and the European Union can be brought to heel by making war on our sirloins and Sunday roasts will lift the hearts and stiffen the backs of the Brexit ultras who believe that Europe secretly knows that it will be destroyed if it does not give Britain everything it wants. It is therefore worth examining.

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To think about the implications of Brexit for the food industries on these islands we have to grasp a concept that many Brexiteers seem to find extremely difficult: Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom.

You would not have known this, admittedly, during the Brexit referendum debates, and it does not seem to have become any more obvious to the true believers in the period since their great victory. But it is a fact.

And it forces us to ask a supplementary question to the one posed by Rees-Mogg – not whether the EU wants to “sacrifice the economy of Ireland on the altar of EU ideology” but whether the Brexiteers want to sacrifice the economy of that part of the UK known as Northern Ireland on the altar of their own ideology.

When Ireland was partitioned, almost a century ago, it made some rough sense to think of the North as primarily industrial and the South as primarily agricultural. The image of the North was a great Harland and Woolf ocean-going liner, of the South the cattle boat across the Irish Sea.

To many Brexiteers this division seems to be alive and well, hence Rees-Mogg’s notion that hurting the beef trade would be a death blow to the Irish economy and the implication that “industrial” Northern Ireland would somehow escape this fate.

Northern Ireland sells €253m a year of beef and lamb to the Republic and the rest of the EU. It sells only €22.3m to the rest of the world

But this stuff just isn’t true any more. Food production is very important to the Republic’s economy – but it is even more important to Northern Ireland’s.

Food and drink is the North’s biggest manufacturing industry. One in every 10 jobs in Northern Ireland is in food production. And a lot of these jobs rely on food exports to the European Union: Northern Ireland exports £1.1 billion, or about €1.25 billion, worth of food to the EU every year, making the EU its largest export market for food.

Crucially, more than 70 per cent of this food is exported either to or through the Republic. It has to cross the Border – a simple thing now but a nightmare if Northern Ireland is dragged out of the customs union and the single market.

Yet the actual complications would be even worse than this. More than a quarter of all the milk produced by farmers in Northern Ireland is processed south of the Border. Forty-two per cent of all the sheep and lambs raised in the North are slaughtered and processed in the South. Restaurants and hotels on either side purchase and serve fresh food sourced across the Border.

In one recent study food-related businesses in Armagh and Down reported sustained growth in their trade with the Republic, which now accounts for 30 per cent of their sales. In fact Northern producers are much better at selling to the South than vice-versa.

In the Rees-Moggian world view (apparently shared by some in the Democratic Unionist Party) none of this greatly matters, because a glorious future of trade with the world beyond the EU will open up after Brexit.

For Northern Ireland this would require a miraculous transformation. Currently, for example, Northern Ireland sells £221 million, or €253 million, a year of beef and lamb to the Republic and the rest of the EU. It sells £19.5 million (€22.3 million) to the rest of the world. In other words the imagined post-Brexit future global trade will start out as much less than a 10th of the business being done within the EU – most of which flows across the Irish Border.

This, moreover, is just one side of the story, the part that will be disrupted if there is a hard border on the island. If Britain leaves the customs union the only alternative to this internal Irish border is, in effect, a border in the Irish Sea – trade barriers between Northern Ireland and rest of the UK.

This, too, would be a nightmare for the flow of food. As a recent report by the Food Research Collaboration, in London, has pointed out, 680,000 tonnes of food leaves Northern Ireland every year for Britain – and 680,000 tonnes goes in the opposite direction.

Seventy per cent of the food bought in Northern Ireland comes from one of the three big British supermarket chains, all of which depend on fast, frictionless just-in-time movement of food within the EU. Such is the integrated nature of food production and consumption that a lamb dish being eaten in Magherafelt probably began with an animal being taken across the Border to a processing plant, exported from the Republic to France, reimported to Britain and then re-exported to Northern Ireland.

This is why the threat to slap tariffs on Irish-produced food to make the Europeans submit to Britannia’s rules is so fatuous. A hard Brexit would certainly do immense damage to Ireland’s food trade, but it would be just as terrible for Northern Ireland.

Notions like attacking Irish agriculture as a way of chastening the dastardly Europeans can occur only to those for whom Northern Ireland is an irrelevance

As the Food Research Collaboration report puts it, “It would raise important challenges for food safety, put jobs at risk, potentially constrain Northern Ireland’s access to health-supporting foods such as fruit and vegetables, and create opportunities for food fraud and crime.”

Unless, of course, Northern Ireland simply doesn’t matter. Rees-Mogg, as he so often does, has exposed the contradiction at the heart of the Brexiteers’ rage that the Irish Border has become such an infuriating obstacle to their project.

On the one hand they are professed unionists who see Northern Ireland as an integral part of their homeland. On the other hand they see the Border issue as a foreign irritant, as if the Border had only one side – the Republic – and its fate were therefore not a vital UK interest too.

Notions like attacking Irish agriculture as a way of chastening the dastardly Europeans can occur only to those for whom Northern Ireland is an irrelevance. People who knew anything about the realities of Irish food would think twice before opening their mouths.