Ben Lowry: We need to be honest that Brexit has been a disaster for unionism

In Lagan Valley constituency, which was the second safest DUP seat in 2017, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson won 60% of the vote in that general election and had a 19,000 vote majority over the Ulster Unionist.

This week his vote share plunged 17% to 43%, and his majority was slashed to one of 6,000 votes over the Alliance candidate, who almost trebled the party’s share of the vote and surged into second place. If other candidates are added together, they came to 25,819 votes, comfortably ahead of Sir Jeffrey’s 19,586 votes.

Consider also something that was revealed yesterday by Tony Connelly, an RTE correspondent who is well briefed by EU and Irish government officials.

He said that the Republic of Ireland will get an “enhanced role” in a committee which will decide which goods travelling between Great Britain and Northern Ireland will attract tariffs and how regulatory checks will be managed under the Boris Johnson-EU Brexit deal.

Boris Johnson has insisted there will be no paperwork for GB-NI trade movements, but all experts say that he is wrong.

Does anyone think that if Ireland has such an enhanced say over such barriers it will use it to help the British ensure that businesses avoid burden as much as possible by turning a blind eye to many movements, or by taking a light touch approach to them?

Does anyone think Dublin will use this role to help calm unionist fears about the scale of the border?

All through the Brexit negotiations Ireland emphasised its unwavering commitment to every aspect of EU rules and to the absolute protection of its markets, regardless of how this might upset the UK.

Some pro unionist Brexiteers think Mr Johnson is going to delay Brexit in order to re-negotiate with Brussels to assuage unionist concerns relating to the Irish Sea.

That seems far fetched now that his landslide election delivery means that, for the first time, he is able to deliver Brexit within weeks.

Friday’s results confirmed a triple disaster for unionists: a free hand for Mr Johnson to press ahead with his major economic internal UK frontier; a resurgent Scottish nationalist movement; and a further decline in the unionist vote in Northern Ireland via a shift to a political party, Alliance, which is ultimately neutral on the Union.

This all has its origins almost entirely in the June 2016 vote in the UK to leave the European Union.

This is not to say Brexit is a policy without merit. As it happens I concluded a decade ago that the cultural gulf between UK and mainland Europe was too great for such a closely entwined relationship.

But if we have learned anything since 2016 (and most of us have learned a lot) then we have found that delivering Brexit and holding the UK together is going to be tricky.

This difficulty is exacerbated by another thing that we have learned: that the most feasible options for the UK are staying in the EU altogether, or leaving it almost entirely (including its trade structures, the single market and customs union).

There are other intermediate options but they all involve so many constraints that most people have concluded that instead of any such soft Brexit it would be better to stay in altogether, and get all the benefits of being in the EU.

The Tory Party and much of the UK public has concluded that a clean break from Brussels is best.

But Scotland, the home country that most opposed Brexit, seems unlikely to tolerate that.

And the only UK-EU land border, here in Northern Ireland, becomes a complex frontier to police. Pressing ahead with Brexit either means enforcing that problem, or moving the border to the Irish Sea.

For two years London’s preferred response to this challenge has been clear — the December 2017 backstop ensured no disruption at all at the land border (the concession was disguised by a revised backstop for the DUP that seemed also to keep the Irish Sea open).

Theresa May tried to avoid the need for any borders, north-south or east-west, by aligning the whole UK to much of EU rules/customs.

Yet for the last two years it has been as if this had never happened. Unionist politicians said we needed a harder Brexit, quitting single market and customs union with Great Britain.

There was almost no movement within mainstream unionism towards a cautious Gibraltar approach (that British peninsula voted 96% against Brexit, such was its fears for its frontier with Spain).

And yet I see why unionism has been in denial. Even though I have been anticipating an Irish Sea border since 2017, and wrote several times about how it might be suddenly introduced (see links below), I too was fooled by the fact that so many Brexiteer Tory MPs complained about how the backstop divided the UK.

I was also talking to well connected people in Westminster who said that everything would change if Boris Johnson became leader.

So it seemed in his August letter to Donald Tusk after entering Downing Street, in which he reiterated that the UK would not be split.

Even though I was anticipating a u turn by him, the speed and scale of his betrayal of the DUP in late October was a surprise. So too was the fact that not one eurosceptic Tory MP opposed a full trade border in the Irish Sea.

Not one.

This abandonment, however, is only one part of the disaster.

The other has been the way in which Brexit has radicalised Irish nationalism. It has also made some non nationalists begin to think of Irish unity, as a way to stay in EU.

Some of this was foreseeable. Leading figures in the Ulster Unionist Party anticipated such problems with Brexit, as did some senior DUP people and academics such as Profs Paul Bew and Henry Patterson.

My own movement from Brexiteer to Remainer happened during the 2016 campaign, as I interviewed top British politicians who came here during the campaign. On June 18, six days before the vote, I wrote a column on this page entitled ‘Brexit might just blow the UK apart’ (see link below).

But almost all of us who took such a stance within unionism then accepted the democratic legitimacy of result, and tried to be as positive about it as we could.

This week’s election results in Northern Ireland, and the results in Great Britain too, which confirm the complete indifference of Middle England to unionist concerns in Northern Ireland, mean that we must now call out Brexit as the disaster to unionism which it is.

You might say: what’s the point? Brexit will happen whatever we say or think or do.

But if there is one thing all unionists need to have seared into their memories from this saga it is our extreme vulnerability at the hands of a much more powerful England that has little attachment to the UK. It will make us wary about again embracing any lurch towards constitutional upheaval.

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter deputy editor

Ben Lowry in 2016: Brexit might blow the UK apart

Ben Lowry Jul 2018: NI still at risk of disastrous Irish Sea border

Ben Lowry Aug 2018: EU sounds flexible but still a peril for NI on backstop

Ben Lowry Sep 2018: Risk of Irish Sea border is rising