Increased DUP pressure over Northern Ireland Protocol is much needed, and most welcome

The leader of the DUP Sir Jeffrey Donaldson has told this newspaper that he will step up the pressure on the UK government to scrap the Northern Ireland Protocol.

He will outline the party’s position if the UK government does not follow through on its hard hitting command paper, issued earlier in the summer. That document effectively called for a new protocol.

Nothing less than such an overhaul is acceptable. Indeed, it is far from clear that the command paper will be enough, even if delivered in full.

This government is responsible for a worse betrayal of unionists even than the Anglo Irish Agreement. The protocol has more far reaching implications than the dreadful 1985 deal with Dublin.

Supporters of Boris Johnson point out, rightly, that he was put in an almost impossible situation by the parliamentary arithmetic in late 2019, and that Brexit might not have happened at all without the NI deal. But the nonsense talked by an ever nonchalant prime minister in the aftermath of his Cheshire agreement with Leo Varadkar suggested that he either did not understand what he had done, or lied about it.

Into this year, Brandon Lewis and government apologists were still saying there was no Irish Sea border.

Another reason not to trust the government is that it is saying it cares about this matter from a unionist perspective, yet is fighting in court that the Act of Union is partly repealed.

Many other actors in this saga come out of it badly, including a business community that treated an open land border as more important than by far our largest trade, East-West.

But the mainstream unionist reaction has been, frankly, poor. Indeed it has been alarming, given the scale of the protocol’s implications. The DUP position for example on North-South is timid, given that East-West has been trashed.

So an increase in pressure from the party, apparent also in Lord Dodds’ letter opposite, is most welcome.

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