Recall ‘bid to crack resolve of unionists’

The TUV leader also branded the Alliance Party as “Sinn Fein’s little helpers” in backing the recall in order “to try to coerce, to cajole unionists to give up the key essential leverage that they have against the inquitous protocol”.

Mr Allister told the chamber: “I trust it won’t work today, I trust it won’t ever work until that protocol is gone because no unionist who is awake at all, sadly maybe that doesn’t include all, can ever come to terms with the fact that under that protocol Great Britain, the other part of this nation, is decreed to be a foreign country.

“Therefore its goods must be checked as if those goods were coming from Bolivia rather than Britain. That is such an affront to my citizenship, to the unionist position that it can never be accepted.”

He said there was a wider issue of democracy that affected not only unionists but also nationalists and others in the Assembly – the powers the EU exercises undemocratically over Northern Ireland.

“You top that off by saying to members of this elected Assembly ‘you should have no power over many of the laws that govern your constituents’. ‘You should have no power to make, to change the laws that govern trade, economy’, all the things that the protocol controls. That is such an affront that no democrat unionist, nationalist or other should be prepared to live under.”

Urging unionists to hold out on the Executive boycott, Mr Allister continued: “So, I want to make this very clear to this house – I trust the attempt to break the resolve of unionism will fail and continue to fail. Unionism needs to hold its nerve. It is doing the right thing and in doing that it has no option but to continue to repudiate and make it very clear that you can’t have the protocol and you can’t have Stormont at the same time.

“This protocol is about dismantling the Union, that’s why Sinn Fein are its cheerleaders. It’s about dismantling Brexit and that is why Alliance are cheerleaders. But it is also the time to realise now is the time to dismantle this Assembly and on your heads be that because that is the course that you have chosen to take.”