The only viable solution to Northern Ireland Protocol must be to repair the damage to the constitution of the United Kingdom

I am writing as a political scientist and former Principal Private Secretary to the First Minister to endorse the important argument made by Owen Polley in Monday’s News Letter (‘Unionists still seem muddled about the harm done by the Northern Ireland Protocol, ’ September 13, see link below).

The visible absurdities created by the Northern Ireland Protocol over paperwork and border controls have already raised costs and constrained supplies of essential products including basic foods and life-saving medicines.

In the long term, it is the damage to the Union which will prove more harmful.

As the UK government has shockingly conceded, the protocol has resulted in the ‘implicit repeal’ of Article 6 of the Act of Union 1800, which guaranteed the integrity of the UK internal market.

Lord Trimble has pointed out that the protocol not only fails in its professed aim of protecting the Belfast Agreement, but has driven a coach and horses through the agreement’s core provisions: British sovereignty, the consent principle, and the equal importance of the east/west dimension.

Northern Ireland now sits in limbo, suspended between the European technocratic elite’s drive to push the Union’s sovereign states into an artificial empire and a United Kingdom at risk of fragmentation.

Unionism is facing its greatest challenge since the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement.

Will its political leaders rise to the occasion?

In this context it is not a pragmatic policy to play along with Brussels by tinkering with grace periods, marginal details and implementation arrangements.

The problem is constitutional, and the only viable solution must be to repair the damage to the constitution.

As a first step, Parliament must explicitly restore the Act of Union, confirming full British sovereignty over Northern Ireland and the integrity of the UK Internal Market.

NI must be released from EU control, whether in the making of hundreds of laws into which we have no input (but Dublin does) or the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice.

Northern Ireland must share in the advantages which the rest of the UK will be gaining as it increases its global competitiveness thanks to Brexit.

PS – Owen Polley, Lord Trimble and I are all contributors to The Idea of the Union, a manifesto which is now available through:

https://blackstaffpress.com/the-idea-of-the-union-9780993560729

Dr WB Smith, BT15

Owen Polley: Unionists still seem muddled about the harm done by the Northern Ireland Protocol

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