Peer's Brexit claims after NI visit '˜delusional and arrogant'

After spending four days in the Province speaking to politicians, young people and business leaders, Lord Adonis has written to the prime minister stating there is widespread concern here about the threat of a hard Irish border post-Brexit.

And he asserted there is “virtually no support for Brexit of any kind in Northern Ireland beyond the leadership of the DUP”.

While a majority of people in the Province voted to remain part of the EU (55.8%), Lord Adonis’s comments appears to discount the 349,442 people in NI who voted to leave the bloc.

DUP Brexit spokesperson Mr Wilson said the peer was “choosing to ignore the democratic will” of the people of the UK.

“He just can’t accept that the referendum did not go his way and decides to make up his own picture of how people feel,” the East Antrim MP told the News Letter.

“He ignores the fact that in a number of constituencies across NI, including my own and that of North Antrim, a majority of people voted to leave. So is he saying that those people don’t exist any longer?”

Mr Wilson said Lord Adonis’s comments have “no credibility” and accused him of treating the electorate like “dummies”.

The DUP MP added: “He has done the same in England as he is doing here. This is all part of his attempt to try and question the validity of the poll which produced a result that he didn’t like.

“He is typical of the crowd who are leading the charge to try and undo Brexit.

“He hopes to do this by pushing his ‘project fear’, as in the past he has warned that we are going to have riots on the street and food shortages. Just palpable nonsense.”

Regarding the people Lord Adonis spoke to during his visit to NI last month, Mr Wilson said: “This was a select group of people he arranged to meet who shared the same view as him.

“If you don’t talk to anyone else other than people who are against Brexit, then of course you are going to go away with that opinion.

“The fact that he claims to know how people in NI are feeling after spending four days here is the epitome of arrogance.”

Speaking on BBC’s Nolan Show on Tuesday, Lord Adonis said: “Even in so far as there is support for Brexit in Northern Ireland, it is not for a hard Brexit.

“The Brexit that is on offer at the moment is a hard Brexit, something that almost all of those people who supported Brexit two years ago believed wouldn’t happen.”

However, TUV leader Jim Allister strongly disagreed with that assertion, saying: “It was made abundantly clear from David Cameron down that if we voted to leave the EU we were voting to leave the customs union and the single market.

“Yet we have this gratuitous insult to the people of the UK who dared to vote Brexit that they didn’t understand what they were voting for.”