Owen Polley: The Ukraine war is just another excuse for the UK government to do nothing about the Northern Ireland Protocol

If these reports accurately represent the attitudes of the foreign secretary and the prime minister, then unionists have a right to be disappointed and angry.

Of course, Ukraine’s predicament dwarfs the seriousness of the problems that the protocol causes between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. But it’s precisely for that reason that the EU’s intransigence on the Irish Sea border, as war approached on its eastern frontier, was strikingly short-sighted and unreasonable.

If anything, the Westminster government should feel aggrieved and emboldened to trigger Article 16. The EU needs its help and input on Ukraine, but still shows contempt for the UK.

The problems created by the protocol have been glaringly obvious since it was introduced at the start of 2021. While they included its effects on trade, the constitutional implications of running a border through the territory of a unitary state are even more serious.

At its essence, the protocol is an attack on British sovereignty in Northern Ireland. The former chief Brexit negotiator, Lord Frost, understood this fact, though he struggled to make the EU accept it.

Obviously, Brussels’ actions cannot be compared credibly to the invasion of a sovereign nation state, but they are still a deliberate attack on the integrity of the United Kingdom.

In response to the Telegraph’s article, the DUP leader, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, stressed that the government must not “freeze” action on the protocol, because of the Russian invasion. He reminded the prime minister that “the protocol remains a problem, and it needs to be addressed.”

The former Brexit minister, Steve Baker, was even more forthright. In a speech to grassroots Tories in east Belfast, he described the argument that the government should postpone triggering Article 16 due to the war in Ukraine as “risible”.

“We must now save the Belfast Agreement and restore power-sharing by doing what is necessary to bring Northern Ireland back into the UK single market. That means using the Article 16 safeguards immediately, before the Stormont elections.”

Unfortunately this kind of moral clarity is increasingly rare in the parliamentary Conservative party.

Lord Frost originally insisted that the protocol issues must be resolved last Autumn, “one way or another”. This apparent deadline was then repeatedly put back, making fools of the government and the DUP.

Even Simon Coveney, the Republic’s interfering, nationalistic foreign minister, initially indicated that talks should conclude by the end of February, so that our election campaign was not overshadowed by the sea border.

Yet, even while Vladimir Putin was setting out Russia’s case for war and recognising the independence of breakaway pro-Russian states in Ukraine, the EU’s negotiators were fretting about rogue cooking oil making its way from the olive groves of Great Britain to Northern Ireland.

At the ninth meeting of the UK-EU ‘joint committee’, set up to oversee the implementation of the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement, an official from Brussels claimed the bloc would negotiate ‘discreetly’ while the election took place.

The government cannot argue that its discussions with the EU were going anywhere quickly, before Russia invaded. Nor can it claim that the threat to Ukraine caused Brussels to adopt a spirit of cooperation or realism.

The bloc knew that war was imminent, and it knew the election was coming, but that didn’t change its intransigent stance one iota. There is no urgency from the EU, and precious little from our own government, to address the problems that the protocol created for Northern Ireland.

Trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland has never posed the remotest threat to the European single market. These sales are vital to our economy, but they involve a relatively low value of goods by EU standards. And, in any case, the shipments involved are patently destined only for Northern Irish consumers.

Even the Alliance Party, with its slavish devotion to Brussels, now seems to acknowledge that clear labelling should be more than enough to allow products to flow freely.

The protocol, which we must remember isn’t yet properly implemented, was designed to keep NI within the EU’s orbit and distance it from Great Britain. It was profoundly political and profoundly constitutional.

Its intention was scarcely even disguised, yet people who rather like that outcome do everything they can to deny its real purpose.

The EU knows Boris Johnson isn’t serious about triggering Article 16 and it has no incentive to allow Northern Ireland’s place in the UK single market to be restored. The Ukrainian war and the impending election campaign are just this government’s latest excuses for doing nothing about a sea border that, left unchecked, will gradually destroy the Union.