Jim Allister: ​Ignore the spin around the Windsor Framework – it has achieved what the IRA failed to achieve

The blunt truth is that the Protocol/Windsor Framework has done what the IRA failed to do – pushed the border to the Irish Sea.

Bad enough when a supposedly sovereign nation can’t control its own borders, but how much more abasing when it establishes an internal border at the behest and under the control of a foreign power.

That is precisely what the Irish Sea Border is!

It is established not by British but by European Union law.

This means its operation falls under the oversight not of the United Kingdom judicial system but the European Court of Justice (ECJ) – vividly illustrating how Union-dismantling it is.

This partitioning border, treating GB as a foreign territory and NI as EU territory, exists because Northern Ireland has been left under the EU’s Customs Code, designed to create a hard external EU border.

By the same token of EU colonial rule much of our economy is now also governed by foreign EU law, leaving us ruled by precisely the same single market laws as the Republic.

The end goal of building the stepping stone of an economic all-Ireland is obvious and inevitable if the Northern Ireland Protocol prevails.

Diversion of trade, as illustrated by recent articles by the economist, Dr Edmond Birnie, is already well under way.

Make no mistake when ‘Varadkar the Venomous’ boasts about a path to Irish unity he is talking about the protocol.

It is the template.

Yet, foolishly, there are those urging unionism to assist this insidious process by restarting the engine of Stormont with Sinn Fein at the wheel.

Boxed in by a one directional protocol, Stormont will only ever help, not hinder, the process.

There are at least seven powerful reasons why unionism must hold its nerve and refuse to operate a Vichy Stormont:

• The assembly would have to implement foreign laws it didn’t make and can’t change. It would be a slave of EU colonial rule.

• It would have to operate with the Irish Sea border, partitioning the United Kingdom and aligning Northern Ireland economically with the Republic.

• It could not make or secure any changes to the protocol; even any such proposal would be blocked by the Sinn Fein veto.

• Once Stormont operates the protocol it will never change, but its suspension of Art 6 of the Acts of Union would have the boost of unionist assent.

• To operate Stormont under the protocol is to accept that never again will NI be a full part of the UK, but rather is part of an evolving all-Ireland.

• It is no coincidence that the loudest voices demanding the return of Stormont are those whose mission, like the IRA before them, is to fully detach us from the UK.

Now that the ‘rigorous implementers’ hold the majority in Stormont, it would inevitably be an aid, not an obstacle, to Protocol rule.

The Protocol’s assault on our critical GB to NI trade, by putting it under EU control, and the surrender of British sovereignty will not be fixed by new promises or even laws assuring our NI to GB trade, nor by London - rather than Stormont - leading on implementation. Such does nothing to rectify our annexation into the EU or rid us of the Irish Sea border or colonial rule.

Nor, would something dressed up as a conditional return to Stormont conceal the permanency of the reality that the fight against the Union-dismantling Protocol is then over.

Finally, anyone deluded into thinking the Windsor Framework wrought any substantial change to the iniquitous Protocol needs to realise that it was made under Art 164 of the Withdrawal Agreement which expressly forbade any change to “the essential elements” of the Protocol. So, NI as EU territory under their Customs Code and subject to the full panoply of EU Single Market laws, both of which keep Art 6 of the Acts of Union in suspension, is the landscape in which Stormont would have to operate. A landscape wholly incompatible with being an integral part of the United Kingdom. Becoming a latter day implementer is no role for any unionist leader who, like me, solemnly pledged on Ulster Day 2021 as follows:-

“We, the undersigned Unionist Political Leaders, affirm our opposition to the Northern Ireland Protocol, its mechanisms and structures and reaffirm our unalterable position that the Protocol must be rejected and replaced by arrangements which fully respect Northern Ireland’s position as a constituent and integral part of the United Kingdom”.

Here all who see the Protocol for what it is need to stand. We should do no other.

This is the latest in a series of essays on the Windsor Framework and whether or not the DUP should return to Stormont. Previous essays by Doug Beattie, Lords Godson and Bew, and Sir Jeffrey Donaldson are on our website