Chris Grey

And that, of course, not just one of the big lies, but also what turned out to be one of the biggest issues that shaped the entirety of what happened with Brexit.

But nonetheless, leaving that aside, you know, the clear commitment was to say common travel area is sacrosanct with or without Brexit.

So it is, as you say, quite extraordinary for it now to be a vote.

Of course, there are other people, as you rightly say, some people within the unionist community who never accepted it anyway.

And that's another dimension.

One of the things you can see happening here, I think, is in the same way as happened with the question of EU membership.

that all kinds of quite disparate concerns and agendas could be sort of packed into the question of Britain's membership of the EU.

And here I think we see with these current incidents a whole set of different things also being packed into it, one of which, as you rightly say, is a pre-existing agenda amongst some countries.

unionist politicians with respect to the common travel area the things about immigration which we've talked about and issues about issues about social media you know a whole stack of things get poured into this particular or these you know these these these particular incidents all of this I think makes for you know make makes for poor decision making but I think to my mind the issue to come back a little more directly to order and the whole narratives around immigration is

is that I think what has happened, and it is partly a result of Brexit, is that what used to be what we might perhaps call, or if we were in France, we would call sort of cordon sanitaire around extremist politics, has been, or began to be very substantially eroded by Brexit and is further eroded.

And my point here would be to say that a generation ago, a figure like Enoch Powell,

who, in many ways, you can see the current generation of populist and right and far-right leaders as inhabiting a not dissimilar space, that he, after the rivers of blood speech, sacked from the Conservative shadow cabinet, and although he did end up, in fact, being an MP in Northern Ireland for the Ulster Unionist Party.

That's right, yes.

One of the Unionist parties, yes.

But effectively, he continued to be in some ways influential, but his kind of career in mainstream politics was over, right?

And there was always a sense of that's beyond the pale.

I mean, I'm not certain I would necessarily want to say the cordon sanitaire has disappeared.

I just think it's been very much weakened.

And so to give an example, I mean, when at, not Prime Minister's Question Time today, but Prime Minister's Question Time last Wednesday,

And Farage raised the issue of so-called two-tier policing in relation to the Henry Novak case.