Alliance seeks pro-Union votes yet is backing nationalist bid to break up the UK

This week, two new opinion polls were published, examining attitudes to Brexit and the border.
Alliance Party leader Naomi Long, SDLP leader Colum Eastwood, Sinn Fein leader at Stormont Michelle O'Neill and Steven Agnew of the Green Party deliver a joint statement on Brexit in the Great Hall at Stormont on Tuesday May 22. Pic by Arthur Allison, Pacemaker PressAlliance Party leader Naomi Long, SDLP leader Colum Eastwood, Sinn Fein leader at Stormont Michelle O'Neill and Steven Agnew of the Green Party deliver a joint statement on Brexit in the Great Hall at Stormont on Tuesday May 22. Pic by Arthur Allison, Pacemaker Press
Alliance Party leader Naomi Long, SDLP leader Colum Eastwood, Sinn Fein leader at Stormont Michelle O'Neill and Steven Agnew of the Green Party deliver a joint statement on Brexit in the Great Hall at Stormont on Tuesday May 22. Pic by Arthur Allison, Pacemaker Press

On the surface, the results were encouraging for unionists, but the data has been interpreted in wildly different ways.

A survey commissioned by Queen’s University revealed that just 21.1% of people would vote for Northern Ireland to join an all-Ireland republic, if a border poll were conducted after the UK leaves the EU.

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The think-tank Policy Exchange unveiled broadly similar results, showing that around 59% of respondents are in favour of the Union in its current form.

While there’s strong support for staying in the UK, people are anxious and perhaps a little confused about Brexit.

The Queen’s survey shows that most voters in Northern Ireland, 61%, would prefer the whole country to stay in the EU single market and customs union.

That’s an easy sentiment to understand, because it would quickly make the stickiest border issues go away.

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Much attention was devoted to the fact that almost a quarter of respondents said they’d prefer Northern Ireland to stay in the customs union and single market, even while the rest of the UK leaves.

This is the ‘special status’ option and it corresponds with the EU’s interpretation of its so-called ‘backstop’, that distorts flagrantly the contents of the ‘joint report’ agreed by the government and the European Commission, back in December.

Whether by coincidence or design, the Queen’s poll results were followed quickly by a statement from Alliance, Sinn Fein, the Green Party and the SDLP, demanding that Northern Ireland stay in the customs union and single market.

This would be a relatively uncontroversial platform, were the parties asking only that the UK as a whole stays closely tied to the EU, because they believe that our interests will be served best by such an arrangement. Indeed, they could then legitimately claim to reflect the views highlighted by survey respondents.

Yet none of the parties stops there.

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They’ve made it quite plain that if there’s a choice between some additional cameras and buildings along the existing border on the island of Ireland or a brand new customs border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, then they’d rather have checks at the Irish Sea.

Of course, two of the parties are ideologically committed to breaking up the United Kingdom and this separatism guides their policy decisions. Despite their supposed commitment to the principle of consent, they’re quite open about seeking to erode Northern Ireland’s links to the rest of Britain and tie it more closely to Dublin.

In contrast, Alliance has appealed to unionists for votes, on the pretext that NI’s constitutional status is settled for the time being.

Yet, let’s be quite clear, the party is prepared to compromise our place in the Union as it’s never been compromised before, in order to prioritise an all-Ireland economy and society that is largely a fiction anyway.

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The party and its even sillier little sister, the Greens, will say that they want the whole UK to stay closely aligned to the EU. In the real world, we know that Theresa May is committed to leaving both the single market and the customs union, even though a range of compromise options are still being considered.

It’s quite possible to advocate the entire nation remaining close to Brussels, while making it clear that internal UK barriers are unacceptable.

If voters believe they have a choice between a fluffy ‘soft Brexit’ and a forbidding ‘hard Brexit’, naturally they’ll go for the softer option every-time.

They may even have some understanding that these options involve our relationship with the customs union and the single market.

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The message has to be driven home to pro-Union voters that these aren’t the likely choices facing Northern Ireland, because, if the principle of consent has any meaning and our place in the UK is worth anything at all, our relationship with the EU has to be consistent across the nation.

If we stay in the customs union and the single market, while the rest of the country leaves, there will be a customs border in the Irish Sea, most likely alongside checks on product standards and rules of origin.

Companies in Northern Ireland will encounter barriers when they try to sell to Great Britain, which is by far our biggest market for external sales, in order to draw us closer to the Republic of Ireland’s economy, where we sell four times less.

Understandably, this idea is supported by those who are emotionally invested in creating an Irish nation across the island. Yet it’s also being driven by liberal rage at Brexit, the inchoate, self-harming notion that Brexiters ‘broke it’, so they should ‘fix it’ and the comfy, self-satisfied assumption that nice people don’t like borders (in Ireland at least).

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Alongside its poll, Policy Exchange published a wonderful paper called The State of the Union, by the academic Arthur Aughey, who articulates the pro-Union response with clarity.

A special status, he writes, “would breach UK sovereignty in Northern Ireland” and “bear no relationship to the substance” of the Belfast Agreement.

Hear, hear.