EU Brexit negotiator attacks Boris Johnson's 'old-fashioned' views on identity

The European parliament’s Brexit negotiator has launched a scathing attack on Boris Johnson, saying his recent criticism of young voters who feel allegiance to Europe was “old-fashioned” and “nonsense”.

Guy Verhofstadt told a special meeting of three committees in the Irish parliament that it was perfectly possible to feel European while at the same time feeling allegiance to your country of birth.

“Some British politicians – not to name Boris Johnson – criticise their countrymen and women for wanting to keep their European identity. He accuses them of ‘split allegiance’. I think this is a binary, old-fashioned and reductionist understanding of identity. I think we need to be smarter, more open and more inventive then that,” he said.

“It’s nonsense to talk about split allegiance. It’s perfectly possible to feel English, British and European at the same time. As it is perfectly normal to be a Dubliner, Irish and European at the same time,” he said.

“It is this position that needs to be defended by our European Union just as the European Union needs to [make sure] there is no return to the past, to hard borders on our continent, and certainly not to a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.”

Verhofstadt’s attack comes after the foreign secretary’s Daily Telegraph article in which he said lack of allegiance to the country by some voters drove the leave result in the EU referendum last year.

“I look at so many young people with the 12 stars lipsticked to their faces, and I am troubled with the thought that people are beginning to have genuinely split allegiances.

“And when people say that they feel they have more in common with others in Europe than with people who voted leave I want to say, but that is part of the reason why people voted leave,” he said.

Verhofstadt, who spent Wednesday in Belfast meeting political leaders, and the evening on the Irish border, said Ireland showed it was possible for multiple self-identification to co-exist and flourish.

He said the worst kind of borders were those “that run through people’s hearts and minds”. These, he said, “breed division, discrimination and hostility”.

The former Belgian prime minister also repeated his insistence that there could be no return to a hard border of checkpoints in Ireland after Brexit.

On Wednesday evening he visited a border farm in Co Monaghan, remarking that it was impossible to see where one jurisdiction started and the other ended.

Verhofstadt described the Irish border as an “illogical divide” and called for it to remain invisible.

“Certainly the cows couldn’t see it. Cows from the north eating grass from the south, milked in the north by a farmer from the south with their milk bottled in the south,” he said.

“I’m a Belgian so surrealism comes naturally to me, but to reinstate the border would be more than surreal, it would be totally absurd, even for me.”