Statement by TUV North Down candidate John Gordon:
“The North Down MP, Stephen Farry, recently tweeted that the demand by Lord Frost that the ‘Tories should pledge to tear up the Northern Ireland Protocol’ would ‘sow more division’ at a ‘time when the international community needs to show unity to confront Putin’.
“This statement is a cynical attempt by Mr Farry to utilise the horror of Russian aggression in Ukraine to discredit the unionist attempt to abolish the Protocol. Mr Farry’s argument presupposes that there is an inherent incompatibility between opposition to the Protocol and recognition of the need for unity on the part of the international community to confront Putin.
“The simple fact of the matter is that no such incompatibility exists. Opposition to the Protocol is entirely compatible with support of the Ukrainians in their heroic struggle to retain the sovereignty of their country against Russian aggression – in fact, opposition to the Protocol is itself crucially about the issue of the sovereignty of the United Kingdom as the TUV leader has forcefully argued.
“Why is unionist opposition to the Protocol entirely legitimate and imperative? The economic and constitutional reasons for opposition to the Protocol can be simply stated and have been presented repeatedly with impeccable clarity by the TUV leader.
“The Protocol establishes an entirely unnecessary and highly detrimental economic border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. The Northern Ireland Statistics and Research agency (NISRA) data for 2018 showed that Northern Ireland sales to Great Britain of goods and services were about two and a half times greater than those to the Republic and the opposite flow of goods and services from Great Britain into Northern Ireland was more than four times greater than the flow from the Republic into Northern Ireland. This data shows that Great Britain is Northern Ireland’s most important trading partner. This means that the United Kingdom ‘single market’ (established under Article 6 of the Act of Union) should have been fully protected during the Brexit negotiations.
“The exact opposite happened during the Brexit negotiations. The Protocol retains Northern Ireland within the EU single market. This requires the imposition of trade barriers between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Esmond Birnie is one of Northern Ireland’s leading economists and he has recently calculated that the impact of the Protocol on trade from Great Britain to Northern Ireland is costing Northern Ireland in the region of £850 million per annum and trade re-orientation towards the Republic of Ireland and the EU and away from Great Britain as a consequence of the Protocol will significantly add to the cost of living in Northern Ireland.
“This situation was in effect a capitulation on the part of the UK negotiators (conservative governments under Theresa May and Boris Johnson) to the demands of the EU and the Republic of Ireland. The EU objective in the post 2016 Brexit negotiations was significantly directed to prevent a Brexit that would establish the precedent of a UK ‘easy exit’ perceived by the EU to be a threat to the progress and consolidation of the ‘EU project’ of European economic unification and political federation.
“But in the case of the Republic the ‘old imperative’ of ‘Irish unity’ meant that the Irish (backed by the EU bureaucrats) demanded that Northern Ireland remain within the EU single market/customs union post Brexit – that is they demanded the economic break-up of the United Kingdom. The ideological calculation on the part of the Irish was that the economic break-up of the UK single market would break the Union – the Republic used the context of Brexit to secure by means of the Protocol what they perceived would lay the economic foundation for their goal of ‘Irish unity’.
“This Irish nationalist strategy was rationalised by two basic arguments. The first was that a UK/EU customs border on the island of Ireland was incompatible with the terms of the Belfast Agreement. This argument is in fact demonstrable nonsense – there is not a single word in the Belfast Agreement that would require a post Brexit ‘open border’ on the island of Ireland. The second argument put forward by the leadership of every nationalist party in Northern Ireland and the Republic was that a UK/EU customs border on the island of Ireland would undermine the so-called ‘peace process’. This argument was a vicious ‘weaponization’ of a threat of Irish republican violence to secure the economic break-up of the United Kingdom by means of the Protocol. Unionists or no self-regarding British government should give any credence to this type of threat of Irish nationalist violence – unionist did not withstand thirty years of horrendous nationalist violence to be coerced by a ‘wheeling out’ of a so-called ‘peace process’ and a threat of violence every time nationalists want to secure their objectives.
“But for unionists the constitutional implications of the Protocol are even more significant than the economic implications. Under the terms of the Protocol Northern Ireland is now in effect a sort of EU ‘colony’ subject to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and to EU trade laws and regulations over which Northern Ireland has no control. The Belfast Court of Appeal ruled on 14 March that the legislation implementing the Protocol ‘subjugates’ Article 6 of the Acts of Union which simply means on the basis of any sound political judgment that the Protocol has undermined the constitutional basis of Northern Ireland as an integral part of the Union.
“These considerations mean that the so-called ‘consent principle’ of the Belfast Agreement is simply not worth the paper it is written on. The operation of the Protocol means, as the TUV leader has pointed out, that Northern Ireland’s place within the Union could be ‘salami sliced out of existence’ – a process over which unionists have no veto.
“The unionists who negotiated the Belfast Agreement (the Ulster Unionist Party, The Progressive Unionist Party and the Ulster Democratic Party) sold the Agreement on the basis that the ‘consent principle’ secured the Union when the reality is that the consent principle is no barrier to the ‘hollowing out’ of the substance of Northern Ireland’s place within the Union.
“The ‘hollowing out’ is occurring under the Protocol and that process will be accelerated in the future if the Protocol continues in existence. This demonstrates that the unionist negotiators were ‘out gunned’ by the SDLP and Sinn Fein backed by successive Dublin governments and the Clinton administration during the negotiations that led to the Belfast Agreement. The unionist negotiators literally did not understand what the ‘consent principle’ that they negotiated meant within the terms of the Belfast Agreement.
“Mr Farry’s tweet demonstrates that he is indifferent to the fundamental constitutional and economic implications of the Protocol which amount to a radical undermining of the sovereignty of the United Kingdom and the status of Northern Ireland as an integral part of the Union.”