Letter: DUP must alter course completely to back union

However, what is concerning about the messages is how they demonstrate a strategy that effectively conflates ‘union’ with ‘alignment’. Yet these are two fundamentally different things.

Union depends on being enfranchised within the framework of a common polity, not on being subject to a foreign customs code that, first, makes the rest of the UK a ‘third country’ (that is a foreign country) in relation to Northern Ireland; second, necessitates the imposition of an international sanitary–phyto-sanitary (SPS) border and a customs border between us; and third, involves our being disenfranchised in 300 areas of law.

Of course, one can try and hide this reality (to some extent) by means of Great Britain then submitting to the same EU laws by choice to try and prevent Great Britain and Northern Ireland from ‘doing the splits’, moving in different legislative directions.

However, while this might give something of the impression of union, it is really a sham because it will not change the fact that Great Britain will remain a ‘third country’ in relation to Northern Ireland and to that extent the union will still be in jeopardy.

In this context, the policy of advancing alignment is necessarily complicit in accepting the Irish Sea border and the progressive unbundling of the union, the next step in in which will be the opening of new border control post facilities dividing our country into two in Belfast, Larne, Foyle and Warrenpoint from July.

If the DUP is to stand by the union, it should now change course completely and vigorously champion, night and day, the means of genuinely protecting and upholding the union going forward, Mutual Enforcement.

Dr Dan Boucher, former DUP Director of Policy and Research