Unionist concerns are discarded by President Biden’s administration, which is adopting a partisan approach

When will all the warm talk end?

The gushing statements that some London politicians still make about excellent UK-Ireland relations.

The emphatic pledges to the Belfast Agreement by those who supported terrorism and for whom that 1998 deal is about a stepping stone to a united Ireland.

And the references to US support for peace, as if it is a neutral broker.

It all sounds very well, but is a distortion of what is going on. Relations between London and Dublin are not good — or from a UK perspective should not be good, given the way the Irish government has behaved since 2016.

The pledges to the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) are also misleading, and often code for support for a ‘new Ireland’.

And the idea of America as a neutral broker was again undermined yesterday in comments to this newspaper by US officials. Their support for the NI Protocol is laced with implied menace, like the one Joe Biden himself issued during the election campaign when — disgracefully — he threatened to thwart a trade deal with the UK if Brexit was not handled to the satisfaction of nationalist Ireland.

As Lord Empey, the ex UUP leader who like Jim Allister QC has been a articulate critic of the betrayals of unionism, says the Biden administration seems to be returning to an anti British US policy of the 1980s.

The options for unionism are few. And yet elementary first steps, such making clear that the NI Protocol lacks any unionist consent, are not worthless. It puts Boris Johnson in an uncomfortable place, given his proclaimed unionism, and exposes as hollow the most shrill pledges to the GFA.

The EU’s ongoing bullying approach to vaccines might yet focus minds in Downing Street that in many key respects of daily life, Northern Ireland has been placed on the EU side of the London-Brussels separation,

It bolsters the argument ministers have made about how the near-trigger of Article 16 changed everything.

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