Ben Lowry: The EU will see John Kyle’s remarks as a fresh signal of some unionist support for the Northern Ireland Protocol

The former Progressive Unionist Party leader, who is still a councillor for the PUP in Belfast, said that “if we see that there needs to be fundamental change in the Northern Ireland Protocol, then there are also significant opportunities there”.

Expanding on an article he wrote along similar lines, Dr Kyle on BBC One’s The View talked as if unionists had not thought through opposition to the Irish Sea border, and had rejected it in a knee-jerk way.

That might be a perfectly reasonable position but when he was grilled on it, Dr Kyle’s own understanding of the detail of the protocol seemed lacking.

By calling for change to the Irish Sea border, but an exploration of his possibilities he was only saying what DUP politicians were calling for last year and early this year.

So it was wrong of him to imply that unionists had not been open to the advantages of the Northern Ireland Protocol.

In fact the very opposite has been the case: unionists were too open to it (if they are unionists who value above all the Act of Union).

It was this year, when the new barrier came in, that unionism swung almost entirely against it.

The joint display of solidarity, evident for example in the joint legal action against the Irish Sea border (by DUP, UUP, TUV and others such as Baroness Hoey and Lord Trimble) and the joint appearance at the Conservative Party conference in Manchester last month, was a manifestation of all sections of unionism including PUP coming to see that the long-term implications of the border are very serious.

The UK government itself has come to see this, as apparent in the remarkable changed rhetoric since Lord Frost took over the UK negotiations with the EU.

London even paused its legal case in defence of the protocol (and against the joint unionist position).

But Dr Kyle is out of date in another respect that goes back to 2017.

He is adopting the same confused position that the public was shown to have in the recent University of Liverpool survey, in which people in Northern Ireland across the political spectrum were found to be in support of the Irish Sea border. But the very same poll found overwhelming support across the community, including among republicans, for unfettered internal trade within the UK.

These two positions are incompatible. You cannot be both for the NI Protocol and for open trade across the Irish Sea, given that the whole point of the protocol is that it avoids an Irish land border by moving the border to sea crossing.

So when Dr Kyle calls on unionists to recognise the access to the EU single market and UK internal market he is calling for something that the EU itself will not accept.

And the point is that the legal position, as agreed by Boris Johnson’s government in 2019, is that NI will enjoy unhindered EU access by hindering access between NI and GB.

There was confusion on this very point before the December 2017 backstop. Many unionists were among those who thought that NI could get, as the EU was deceptively implying, the best of both worlds.

In fact the core choice will always be between unfettered internal UK trade and unfettered internal EU trade.

Dr Kyle is a much admired politician and it was good to see Billy Hutchinson speak warmly about him yesterday, despite their differences on the protocol.

But it is unfortunate that when the EU has for months been on the defensive over the protocol, Dr Kyle has allowed a signal once again to go out to Brussels that unionists are open to a revised Irish Sea border, so soon after the Liverpool findings were reported ina misleading way.

The EU has shown it is quite prepared to slash NI checks (so confirming that they were not necessary) so long as it can hold on to the legal (and thus constitutional) change.

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• Ben Lowry (@Benlowry2) is News Letter editor. Other articles by him below and beneath that information on how to subscribe to the paper:

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• Ben Lowry Nov 13: Essays in 2010 about NI on its 2021 centenary foresaw province staying in UK but not change from within

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• Ben Lowry Oct 30: Tribute this week to a great News Letter columnist Ralph Bud Bossence

• Ben Lowry Oct 23:Centenary church service should have celebrated Northern Ireland

• Ben Lowry Oct 16: Lord Frost’s speech on NI reflected notably more robust UK tactics

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• A message from the new editor Ben Lowry

• Ben Lowry Oct 9: Echoes of 2019, as Boris Johnson fails to proclaim his unionism in speech

• Ben Lowry Oct 2: Unionism could make great headway lobbying in the United States

• Ben Lowry Oct 2: A belated happy 284th birthday to ourselves at the News Letter!

• A link to 2021 columns by Ben Lowry

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