Dan Boucher: It’s time for unionism to take a principled stand for democracy
The consequences of last week’s election results are a wake-up call for unionism. To those who respond by saying, ‘Yes, they present the wake-up call relating to the challenge we always understood, and which others foolishly did not quite grasp, namely the need to avoid multiple unionist candidates’, I have to say that there is an even more basic wake-up call that is being missed.
Unionism can only unite if we first agree what unionism is. Until very recently that was not in doubt but the definition of unionism has been subject to unprecedented fracturing especially in the last six months.
At the end of January, we were told by the DUP: ‘The green lane’s gone’, and yet the truth is that not only has the green lane not gone, it isn’t even going. In fact, the green lane is coming!
On October 1 this year we will witness the arrival of the green lane (the so-called UK internal market system) customs border for the purpose of protecting the integrity of the different legal regime and market that now applies across the whole island of Ireland as a result of the imposition of the same laws on Northern Ireland (but not the wider UK) as pertain to the Republic in some 300 areas.
These are laws that, notwithstanding the Stormont Brake, we do not make and cannot amend.
While less demanding than the full Northern Ireland Protocol, which was never implemented and thus never experienced, the green lane customs border will still fetter the flow of goods within the UK, dividing the country into two.
In order to cross that customs border you will need to jump over hurdles that do not apply to movements within the rest of the UK and which did not apply between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK prior to January 2021.
Businesses must successfully apply to become approved trusted traders, have an export number and complete a customs declaration while having to deal with the complexity arising from the fact that products sometimes qualify for the green lane customs border and sometimes don’t, traders sometimes qualify for the green lane customs border and sometimes don’t and with declarations sometimes being upfront and sometimes retrospective.
Moreover, this is in addition to the complexity surrounding other green and red lane border requirements, the full implications of which cannot be appreciated until their enforcement through the border controls posts which are still under construction and won’t become operational until July 2025.
The great prize to be secured in return for accepting fettered access to the rest of our own country, and the indignity of our disenfranchisement across 300 areas of law, as championed by ‘Safeguarding the Union’, is completely unfettered access to the Republic of Ireland market and therein the effective relocation of Northern Ireland out of the UK single market for goods and into an all-island single market for goods.
In prioritising our access to the Republic over the rest of the UK, the so-called Safeguarding the Union deal, championed by the DUP, advances a position that is effectively more nationalist rather than unionist.
The DUP leadership seems to have been in institutional denial about this and must now recognise that it cannot accommodate an arrangement that prioritises unfettered access to the Republic over the rest of the UK when the price of that access is fettered access to the rest of the UK and our partial disenfranchisement.
Going forward, unionism can only be united if we unite around unionism.
In a context where the mutual enforcement border solution, developed from within the EU, provides a means of protecting the integrity of their single market without moving the international border, and disenfranchising the people of Northern Ireland, we should all insist on nothing less.
It is at this moment that some will respond with what they think is the perfect ‘gotcha’ moment, saying, but the EU has said it prefers the border in the Irish Sea and does not want mutual enforcement, so tough!
The point, however, is that in a context where there are two ways of managing the border - one of which involves disenfranchising 1.9 million people, and the other of which does not - the EU has to own the consequences of being seen to insist on the border in the Irish Sea if that is what it wants.
It has to take full responsibility for saying that its technical preference for protecting the integrity of its single market one way, rather than the other, is so important that it gives them the right to deny 1.9 million people the basic dignity of being able to stand for election to make all the laws to which they are subject.
No doubt the EU will kick back initially but if unionism takes a principled stand for democracy, then the cost to the EU brand of being seen willing to lay the citizenship of 1.9 million people on the alter of their preference for one border arrangement over another is likely to become progressively more and more difficult for them to sustain.
Dr Dan Boucher was the TUV/Reform July 4 general election candidate for Belfast South and Mid Down