Ben Lowry: Unionism has been stymied by lack of support in London

Such mockery is all the louder this weekend, amid the political turmoil at Stormont over the Northern Ireland Protocol.

There is little doubt that a clear majority of those who vote for parties that have unionist in their name also voted in favour of a UK exit from the European Union.

It is also true that among the much larger group of voters who are pro Union, but do not vote for ‘unionist’ parties (a group that make up perhaps 25% of voters), there was very significant opposition to Brexit.

Therefore, runs the criticism, that large bloc of people who are both overtly unionist in their voting intentions, and who voted to quit the EU, should ‘own’ the current crisis (and I am with Owen Polley who on page 9 writes that he believes Northern Ireland really is in crisis).

I have previously written about how unionists in NI did not display any of the nervous reaction to the prospects of Brexit that Gibraltarians did at the time of the plebiscite. The latter had such a sense of their own vulnerability, surrounded by a Spain that feels lasting resentment over the peninsula’s British status, they voted 96% to stay in the EU.

Many of the loudest critics of unionism, and its support for Brexit, hector it for not having seen the merits of the EU and of the single market and for instead endorsing the supposed insularity of little Englanders and so on. My own criticism of unionism in the run-up to the 2016 referendum is that there was a failure to think realistically.

The view that Brexit was driven by English nationalism is self-evidently wrong and it confuses two separate issues: the dominance of England within the UK, and the strain of English nationalism.

England is dominant for simple numerical reasons: it makes up 85% of the nation and so will always dominate almost every aspect of cultural, economic and political life in the UK. But there is no proof that English nationalism drove Brexit. England was almost evenly divided, with 53% of voters opting to leave the EU, and 47% preferring to stay.

The other three home countries of the UK were sharply divided too.

Wales had almost a high a percentage of Brexiteers as England, at just under 53% of those who voted in the watershed 2016 EU poll. In Northern Ireland, approaching half of voters wanted out of Europe.

And even in Scotland, almost 40% of those who cast a ballot in the referendum were pro an EU exit.

The UK would have been in deep trouble if Brexit really had been driven by English nationalism, and if — say — 90% of England had backed it and only 10% of Scotland. Instead the UK was unified in one respect: every part of it was split.

In 2016 I thought the arguments in favour of Brexit were very strong, but so too were the arguments against. In the end my own opposition to an EU departure was mainly because I felt that it would put the UK in peril (I now hope that I was too pessimistic about that).

But if there is a unit in Europe that could operate successfully outside the EU it is the British Isles — and I use the term consciously as a geographical one.

If majorities in the four parts of the UK and the Republic of Ireland were all happy to live outside the EU then it would be easier to deliver the UK and Ireland as an internal free-trade area with strong links to Europe and America (but independence from the former).

It is not impossible that such a day will come, depending on how Brexit pans out in the coming years.

The big unionist miscalculation in 2016 was the ability to deliver a full Northern Ireland departure from the EU. That was only possible with massive political support for unionism in London.

I know people in Westminster who point out that sympathy for unionism now is far greater than it was at the time of the 1985 Anglo Irish Agreement. Even so, it is nowhere near where it needs to be for seismic change like Brexit.

I perhaps had a heightened sense of this in 2016 because I had been monitoring developments relating to the legacy of the Troubles.

It has been extraordinary to behold the (still) muted reaction to the way in which republicans are being allowed to win the narrative of what happened after 1968.

The whole apparatus of the UK state has been turned against itself – a country that saw off three decades of terror and prevented civil war. I remain unwavering in my view that this is a moral collapse both within NI and within the corridors of power in London.

While the Republic continues to delight republicans by repeatedly trying to humiliate the UK over legacy in both Europe and the US over alleged past wrongdoing by the security forces, there is still no pressure applied to Dublin, and not so much as a UK demand for an inquiry into the long and stubborn Irish extradition failures of known and fanatical murderers, as a result of which so many people were killed in border areas.

Given that enduring weakness towards the Republic of Ireland, what chance was there of MPs standing up to Ireland over Brexit?

None of this is to say that protocol is even remotely justified. As an opponent of Brexit, I feel all the more resentful over its implementation. I agree with Owen that some unionists seem not to grasp the disastrous implications of the protocol.

The belated signs of flexibility from the EU over checks show how much of the Brexit border challenges could have been resolved by EU exceptions being made for bilateral UK-Ireland arrangements.

I am just trying to understand some of the reasons why we are in this mess. And we can only hope that the resolve shown by London in overhauling the protocol, which mysteriously began to evaporate in November, returns.