The substance of the new deal

Subject: The substance of the new deal.

One of the abysmal aspects of Brexit has been the coverage of the issue in the press. It's all been headline stuff with little in-depth reporting of the facts. 
Today with Boris securing some movement from the EU, mainly regarding Northern Ireland and their situation vis a vis the boarder into Southern Ireland. It seems as if he has given away Theresa Mays red line of not allowing Northern Ireland to be treated differently from the rest of the UK in terms of status. Boris has blown that apart by agreeing to allow Northern Ireland to remain in the EU for a period of 4 years, renewable if the Northern Ireland Parliament wish it and Scotland are up in arms about the preferential treatment saying this is another reason for them to press ahead with independence.
The other and potentially more worrying aspect of his new agreement is his willingness to kick down the road the sureties of workers rights and environmental rights which the EU insist upon and and replace them with Rights envisaged by the Market, and eventually Donald Trump which are inevitably far worse for the ordinary man and woman in the street but right up the street for people like Boris / Rees-Mogg and their chums in business. 
The self harm we do on ourselves is due to the fact that we never see ourselves as 'the other man'. We isolate ourselves in a cocoon of self interest and banish any thought of collective society. Large swathes of that collective society have been won  over by the headline grabbing stories of EU spite and intransigence, of a democratic deficit and a legal system which somehow trumps our own. Of a fear of foreigners and the willingness to go along with jingoism of our own ruling class. 
In law to manipulate a person into doing something they would normally not wish to do is an indictable offence but somehow in politics and the print media it's ok to lie and cheat and to willingly misrepresent facts. Day in day out the press have hounded the European Union with abuse, so much so their gullible readers know no other mantra than a disdain for anything European. Our poorly educated masses are all too vulnerable to tittle tattle and, as in most things, something repeated ad nauseam is believed. 
Boris's new deal, apart from selling the Northern Irish down the road and releasing our government from any responsibility on how it treats its own citizens, is the same as Mrs Mays deal which also kicked most of the judicable issues into the future to be negotiated at a future date.
Too small economically to stand up to the economic giants we have to rejig our thinking towards the second tear of nations who sit around the big table hoping for scraps to fall.  
Of course our history charts a very different course, we discovered some of the countries we must now aline ourselves with and the nations we used to sit with, as a right have moved on. We need a period of looking ourselves in the eye and seeing who we really are in the 21st century. We have to acknowledge we squandered many of our assets, like North Sea oil (the Scandinavian countries created a wealth fund whilst we spent the proceeds as fast as we could) and failed our population in not equipping them to perform in this century with proper training. We played the divide and rule game until no one believes us anymore least of all the people who live here and our class ridden system is not fit for purpose anymore. 
The longer we elect people like Boris Johnson to form the image of who we are the more difficult it will be to dig ourselves out of the hole we willingly dug for ourselves