Rishi Sunak has been exposed in his false claims over the Irish Sea border and so it would be folly to return to Stormont, says Jim Allister

​In his first major comment since the report of House of Lords committee which looked into February’s deal between the UK and the European Union, the TUV leader warned against the folly of restoring Stormont.

Mr Allister said: “The blatant lies of the prime minister at the Lambeg Cola Cola plant, when he oversold the Windsor Framework as the end of the border in the Irish Sea, are now exposed for all to see. Recognising that because of the unaltered Art 164 of the Withdrawal Agreement, which expressly forbids any change to ‘the essential events’ of the Protocol, TUV called it right when it dubbed the tinkering as the ‘Windsor Whitewash’. No matter how much the prime minister lied and others dithered and equivocated, it was abundantly clear that the Irish Sea Border stayed, that we remained in the EU’s single market for goods and under its Customs Code and, thus, Great Britain was to continue to be designated a foreign country whose goods must be checked when entering the EU territory of Northern Ireland.

“As a colonial rule taker we remain subject to foreign law, jurisdiction and court. And all this for the political purpose of ensuring economic alignment, as a constitutional stepping stone, with the Republic. None of this has changed, indeed the recently published government guidance on the functioning of the Irish Sea border both confirms the reality of what His Majesty’s Government lied about and our detachment from Great Britain. Even the supposedly easier ‘green lanes’ operate exclusively under EU law and oversight.”

Mr Allister added: “To have to even be in a ‘trusted trader scheme’ to trade within your own country is confirmation in itself of the constitutional wedge that is driving us apart.”

Mr Allister continued: “The practical and constitutional detriment of the Windsor Whitewash is matched only the folly of those who profess allegiance to the Union, but who want us to implement its destruction through operating what now must and can only be a Union-dismantling Stormont. To operate Stormont is to implement the very Protocol which itself, according to the Supreme Court, put Article 6 of the Acts of Union into suspension. To be a protocol implementer is to ensure that Union-dismantling suspension is permanent.”

Last week the DUP leader in the House of Lords, Lord Dodds, said that the report by the committee of peers on the details of the Windsor Framework showed that it failed the DUP’s seven tests to restore Stormont “utterly”.

The former DUP deputy leader, who is on the Lords committee but which has more pro-EU members than Brexiteers, cited the way in which the report said that the new trade arrangement across the Irish Sea will be an improvement on the NI Protocol as it was originally designed but more burdensome than the protocol as it is at present, because it has never been implemented due to the UK’s unilateral imposition of grace periods.

The report last Tuesday cited various concerns of groups such as hauliers and retailers to aspects of the framework including the proposed red and green lanes and the Stormont lock, and then repeatedly calls on Mr Sunak’s government to provide clarity in response to those concerns.

While the party already said in its council manifesto that it failed the tests, Lord Dodds last week said so with greater emphasis.

Lord Dodds said: “It is clear that the Windsor Framework utterly fails the seven tests set by the DUP. It represents the embedding of the Irish Sea border to a greater extent than anything we have seen thus far.”

He claimed that the report showed the framework “makes things worse for businesses compared to what they have experienced up to now”. Lord Dodds, whose party currently refuses to operate power-sharing at Stormont, in protest at the Irish Sea border, said: “The original protocol was unworkable and could not be implemented without major damage to our economy. That led to grace periods and easements. Now these are to be done away with and replaced with the more onerous and burdensome Windsor Framework provisions.