Owen Polley: No amount of hype, obfuscation, or appeals for ‘optimism’ will alter the fact of the internal UK border

You could call it DUPology. It is, after all, a science that involves educated guesswork, as well as a willingness to sift through all kinds of riddles, intrigues and mixed messages.

Last week, DUPologists again practised their craft, as Sir Jeffrey Donaldson repeated in interviews that ‘significant gaps’ remained between his party and the government, in negotiations over the Windsor Framework.

In an internal email, he told party members that ministers should ‘undo the harm caused by the protocol’ and expressed sadness that some people were urging him to argue this position from within the executive, effectively accepting that we’d become detached from the UK internal market.

These messages were complicated by a letter he wrote to this newspaper on Thursday, accusing it of publishing a “defeatist and negative editorial” the day before.

The offending leader column argued that, “Few unionists will see victory in a return to Stormont.” It congratulated the DUP on sticking to its seven tests for solving the framework’s problems, but argued that, increasingly, its statements implied that the revival of power-sharing was inevitable.

In response, Sir Jeffrey wrote, “Support for the Union was at its highest in Northern Ireland when we had fully functioning devolution. In a NI that is changing, unionists need to broaden support for the Union, and this will not be achieved by retreating to the narrow ground implicit in the editorial.”

Sir Jeffrey insisted that his party will not hesitate to say ‘no’ to any offer from the government that “does not deal with our fundamental concerns and is not in the best long-term interests of our place in the Union”.

As the editorial had pointed out, though, if the DUP leader believes that devolution is essential to the maintenance of the UK, though, surely that means that he has already made up his mind that resuming power-sharing will best serve those ‘long-term interests’?

It doesn’t seem much of a leap to conclude that Stormont’s return may now depend less on the merits of any deal than intra-party politics.

That does not make it certain that the executive will be back this year, but it is at least a serious possibility.

However you weigh the benefits of remaining out of Stormont against the trade-offs that it undoubtedly involves, we can be almost certain that the most pressing problems for unionism – the Northern Ireland Protocol and the Windsor Framework – will remain in place.

It would be wrong to forget that, even if a mood of celebration accompanies the assembly’s return.

It is possible that the government will promise to enact legislation that protects Northern Ireland’s place within the UK internal market, as the DUP has reportedly demanded. The Conservatives have undertaken to implement similar legal commitments before, though they’ve ultimately either failed to materialise or proved ineffective.

There may even be promises of extra money, new bodies focussing on the Union or other political bits and pieces.

The Windsor Framework showed that politicians and governments can spin very little so that it appears like rather a lot. It’s also easy for the public and journalists to get caught up in the excitement of new political developments and forget about the details or dismiss the importance of what happened before.

Whatever happens in the run-up to Christmas, short of a miracle the Irish Sea border will remain in place. And it will still represent perhaps the greatest reverse inflicted on Northern Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom since its creation.

A Conservative and Unionist government that purports to care about the Union will still have handed unprecedented economic and political authority over part of its territory to a foreign power. We will stay, at best, semi-detached from the rest of the UK’s economy, with greater divergence to come as the Windsor Framework is fully implemented over the next few years.

In 2024, a broader range of goods will have to travel through the green and red lanes, and by 2025 that process will be complete, with Border Control Posts in full operation. That inevitably means higher costs for businesses, less choice for consumers and closer links to Dublin and Brussels, at the expense of our ties with Great Britain.

These irreparable changes will have been inflicted on Northern Ireland, chiefly to avoid new checks or infrastructure at the international land border between the UK and the Republic, so that nationalists could continue to pretend that that frontier does not exist. Our government effectively decided that it was more important to avoid offending Irish separatists than to protect our right as part of the UK to participate fully in its national economy and politics.

No amount of hype, obfuscation, or appeals for ‘optimism’ will change any of these facts. It’s rather like telling someone who has been beaten and abused to ‘get over it’, while their bruises are still showing and without any genuine recognition of the harm that’s been inflicted upon them.

There is already plenty of scarcely concealed impatience with ‘naysayers’ who point out the continued problems with the Irish Sea border. It exists particularly among Conservatives in Great Britain but, increasingly, even among unionists in Northern Ireland. And if there were to be a deal, no doubt that chorus would become deafening.