Owen Polley: Kemi Badenoch's highly misleading statement on Windsor Framework contains two serious flaws

She was speaking after a brief appearance at the Northern Ireland Conservatives’ conference in Belfast, where she made a speech and took questions from delegates about her party’s plans to return to government.

“We know that it was a very difficult settlement,” Mrs Badenoch said. “But the Windsor Framework, as we negotiated it, was an improvement on what we had before … we need … to make sure that we don’t start going backwards on any of the things that we have done.”

This statement was highly misleading, and it calls into question the Tories’ willingness to apologise for making mistakes on Northern Ireland. Not only that, but as the UUP MLA, Steve Aiken, told this paper, the remark failed even to “recognise the challenges and problems being imposed by the Irish Sea border”.

There were two very obvious flaws in Badenoch’s thinking. Firstly, “what we had before” (the framework) was the original Northern Ireland Protocol, which was agreed by Boris Johnson, a Conservative prime minister.

Indeed, the principle of treating Northern Ireland differently from the rest of the country after Brexit was established by Theresa May and put into practice by Johnson. So, two Tory leaders were ultimately responsible for cutting us off, politically and economically, from the British mainstream.

Secondly, far from improving the Irish Sea border, the framework removed the ‘grace periods’ that, up to that point, had prevented much of the disruption it threatened to inflict. Some of the most damaging trade barriers had never been put in place, because they were unworkable. In contrast, the framework deal was designed specifically to make them workable and permanent, regardless of the pain that might cause consumers and businesses.

The sea border has actually become significantly harder since Rishi Sunak negotiated the framework with the EU and ‘Safeguarding the Union’ with the DUP. For instance, the courts ruled over the past two years that the House of Commons is not free to legislate for Northern Ireland on certain policy areas, like immigration or legacy.

Under provisions of the framework, EU laws were judged to be supreme, so the Rwanda Act and parts of the legacy act were struck down. The current government recently abandoned its appeals against this principle.

We are now subjected to Brussels’ new product safety regulations too, which means that many GB companies have pulled out of our market altogether. This is about to become worse, because a ‘parcels border’, included in ‘Safeguarding the Union’, is set to add bureaucracy for mainland businesses that want to sell here. The leading delivery company, Parcelhero, has predicted ‘significant disruption’ is imminent.

There is also clear evidence that the framework caused ‘trade diversion’. Rather than buying British goods, firms and consumers are forced to buy more expensive alternatives from the Republic and continental Europe.

If Mrs Badenoch had witnessed more of the local Tories’ conference, she would have heard a spokesman from the hospitality industry say that the sea border had increased the price of food products for businesses in his sector.

The new Conservative leader has had a tough start, but on some subjects she’s spoken well. In her interview with the News Letter, she criticised the influence of ‘extreme gender ideology’ on Stormont. Most government departments in the UK have stopped working with the discredited LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall, but it is still being paid for its services by the Northern Ireland Civil Service.

Mrs Badenoch also defended the Tories’ legacy act, which should have protected members of the security forces from prosecutions. And the secretary of state, Alex Burghart, described Alliance as a “‘left wing party’ that does not have the ‘solutions to the economy … (or) public services.”

Mrs Badenoch’s appearance at their event certainly gave NI Conservatives a badly needed morale boost. In the 1980s, this small but indefatigable group of campaigners had to overcome the reluctance of their own party leadership, when they tried at first to stand candidates in Northern Ireland.

At the event, the former NIO junior minister and aide to successive Tory secretaries of state, Lord Caine, alluded to those days. He said he had always believed in Northern Ireland being “properly and fully integrated into the political system of the United Kingdom”.

This was a neat summary of the local Conservatives’ goals over the past four decades. Unfortunately, Lord Caine’s conviction that our province should not be treated as ‘a place apart’ from the rest of the country was served poorly by the party’s policies in government and Mrs Badenoch’s latest comments on the Windsor Framework.

The fact that Northern Ireland is so often treated differently is not just the Tories’ fault, but also a failure of successive generations of unionists. Even now, our politicians often argue, when it suits them, that we should be an exception to the mainstream; particularly when it comes to special financial treatment.

At the same time, the Northern Ireland Conservatives’ most powerful pitch to pro-Union voters was always based on putting this region at the heart of UK politics. It is therefore a problem that their leader has refused to support ‘unpicking’ a deal which prevents Westminster from legislating on important aspects of life here. At the very least, it’s a contradiction that NI Tories will struggle to explain to potential supporters.