NI still at risk of the full backstop being imposed by MPs

There was much talk on Thursday of movement towards an EU and UK Brexit deal.

The suggestion was of such an agreement revolving around Boris Johnson’s proposal for a single agri zone for the island of Ireland, which the DUP would back (it has said it is open to compromise if Stormont has a role).

This would have been a remarkable breakthrough. It would have meant Dublin climbing down, or being forced by Brussels to climb down, on most of the backstop, except in agrifood and sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) spheres.

Even this would have been a constitutional change to Northern Ireland’s place in the UK: we would lose control of agricultural regulations, probably forever. But it would have been much less damaging than the overall backstop.

But Irish leaders made clear yesterday, there is no such climb down coming. As Robert Peston says in the tweet below, a deal is as far away as ever. This makes it all the more possible that a desperate Boris Johnson will woo a few dozen Labour MPs and the expelled Tories to push through the Withdrawal Agreement with its disastrous backstop.

Unionists can do little except make clear that the full spectrum of unionism will reject this outrage and that the parallel consent envisaged by the Belfast Agreement, to which Arlene Foster rightly refers, has been ignored.

It is hard to see how unionists in such circumstances could accept Stormont talks jointly presided over by Dublin.