TUV conference: Do not return to Stormont, says the Brexiteer Ben Habib

Mr Habib explained how he had become so interested in Northern Ireland, after first being invited to the Province by the IRA victim Aileen Quinton prior to the NI Protocol.

Mr Habib said: "Michel Barnier said repeatedly that the price of Brexit would be Northern Ireland and he kind of gave us a binary choice which was; you either give up on Brexit or you give up Northern Ireland and we are going to make sure it's one or the other of those two. So very early on it was clear to me that we had to fight the protocol."

He said the "establishment had already decided and accepted that the price of Brexit is Northern Ireland and they were prepared to throw Northern Ireland under a bus. If it wasn't for people like yourselves, Jim, Willie [Ross] and other unionists, they would have done it by now. It's only because we've been fighting the fight that we are fighting that we've kept them at bay. But there's a lot, lot more we have to do. We haven't defeated the protocol, quite contrary to the impression that Rishi Sunak would wish to give you."

To loud applause from the crowd, Mr Habib said: "The Windsor Framework the more I look at it, at the start I thought it was just another form of the protocol, now I realise it is worse than the protocol. The reason it is worse than the protocol is because it embeds EU laws in Northern Ireland. There's no way back from those laws that exist."

Mr Habib said: "So it was when the Framework was revealed that I thought 'damn, am I going to have to get back into frontline politics'?"

To further applause, Mr Habib said that "it's paramount that Stormont is not restored if the Irish Sea border is to be implemented, let the ignominy of that go to British government ministers doing it. Let them do it over the heads of people in this province but do not somehow become complicit by reforming Stormont". He said unionism lives “in siege mentality because your very existence is threatened perpetually” but “unionism has to come out of Northern Ireland. It has to be integrationist, it has to come out to the mainland and sell its policies."