The EU is not budging on the Irish Sea border and the UK is not helping to resist it

News Letter editorial of Thursday February 25 2021:
News Letter editorialNews Letter editorial
News Letter editorial

There is a coming breach between unionists and the UK government over the Northern Ireland Protocol that will be very difficult to avoid.

Boris Johnson’s initial promotion of his deal was that it was a good thing for NI, for the UK, for unionists and that it did not create a border.

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The extent to which he got away with this fiction was extraordinary.

After his betrayal, the prime minister felt no embarrassment coming to Northern Ireland at the end of 2019, in early 2020 (where, grinning, he approved the restoration of Stormont on Sinn Fein terms) and indeed during a quieter time in the pandemic.

He insisted that there was no border in the Irish Sea, and his secretary of state, Brandon Lewis was still insisting that this year, after the scale of the barrier was becoming clear.

The border was not only real, it was already disastrous.

Yet the unionist reaction to it all from October 2019 was for a long while muted. Any business outrage in late 2019 at agreement to a barrier in the Irish Sea was non existent, yet businesses before then almost universally lobbied hard for the Theresa May backstop, which had as its central aim the fact that the Irish land border must not change in any way.

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Shocking though this sequence of events has been, the one group of people who cannot acquiesce in it any longer are unionist political parties. Not only because it is a constitutional attack on the Union, but because of the signal that it sends —that unionists will accept anything.

The fact that both the DUP and UUP area backing the legal case against the protocol is welcome but makes working the border seem rather absurd. It was clear yesterday after the UK-EU-NI meeting that Michael Gove is not going to ride to the rescue. And how could he do so? The Brexit deal is set.

There are few easy options, but at the very least we need to hear what is going to be tried. If the answer is nothing, then that will have to be made clear.

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A message from the Editor:

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Alistair Bushe

Editor