Statement by TUV leader Jim Allister:-
“About time” is TUV’s primary response to the DUP’s announcement of the resignation of the First Minister.
“TUV has long said key to getting rid of the Union-dismantling Protocol was ending all complicity in its implementation. Hence the folly of the Poots Posts and checks which helped the iniquitous Protocol bed in.
“We have long said that if the price of Stormont is the implementation of the Protocol that it was a price no unionist should pay, or ever should have paid!
“The Protocol is so fundamentally destructive of our integral position within the United Kingdom that it must go in all its parts. There can be no halfway house on our constitutional position and it can not be secured without the EU giving up its ill-gotten sovereignty over Northern Ireland.
“Continuing in a foreign single market, under a foreign customs code and VAT regime, all governed by foreign laws we don’t make and can’t change and overseen by a foreign court, is not compatible with being part of the United Kingdom. Hence this Protocol is irredeemable and unbearable for unionism.”