TUV conference: Reform MP pledges 'one border one crown' principle will guide any deal with EU
Any new deal with Brussels under a Reform UK government must respect the sovereignty of the entire United Kingdom, the man in charge of Nigel Farage’s policy manifesto has said.
Danny Kruger MP says that the Union must be re-established “as a single, indivisible state – whole and entire – with one sovereign parliament, one border and one crown”.
The former Tory politician, who defected to Reform, was addressing the TUV conference on Saturday. He said Reform would work with all unionists, including his parliamentary colleagues in the DUP.
Mr Kruger has been tasked with setting his party’s policy manifesto for government, should Mr Farage get the keys to Downing Street after the next general election.
TUV leader Jim Allister has said he is the man whose ear the party wants to bend – and at Saturday’s conference in Cookstown Mr Kruger said the pair sat in Parliament’s “naughty corner with all the ragtag characters”.
The Reform MP began his speech by thanking the “good men and women” of Northern Ireland for their “sacrifice and suffering” for the country as a whole. Acknowledging that as a Tory MP he had voted for the original Irish Sea border arrangements believing they would be temporary – he said he had then voted against the Windsor Framework.
He said the deal leaves the British government “in a terrible bind” between causing divergence between GB and NI or keeping the entire country aligned to the EU. He said these were “both unacceptable options to a unionist and a sovereigntist like me” – calling the deal a humiliation for the whole of the UK.
Mr Kruger said the deal “was so unfair on the Unionist community in Northern Ireland. From 1972 until 2024 through all the Troubles, and through the era of the Belfast Agreement, through all those years when there was a Unionist majority in the politics of NI – it was agreed and understood that there would not be majoritarian rule”.
However, he said that now that unionism has lost the majority at Stormont, the principle of cross-community consent was being “chucked”.
Mr Kruger said Reform will work with “every Unionist to sustain the union”.