Statement by TUV party chairman and East Londonderry Assembly candidate Jordan Armstrong:
“Today’s statement by the UUP chairman warning against collapsing Stormont is foolhardy. If it arises from a failure to grasp the full constitutional threat of the iniquitous Protocol, then it is also worrying.
“If mere words of condemnation of the Protocol could remove it, then it would be long gone.
“It is clear that maximum political pressure needs to be brought to bear on the UK Government and the EU. No one is suggesting that this will be easy but Unionism needs to get serious. We are talking about a serious threat to the very Union that makes us unionists.
“Unionism had few cards to play in 1985. In 2021 devolution exists only because of buy in from Unionism. A project in which the Government has invested more than two decades of political capital depends on the DUP and UUP continuing to play ball.
“Yet the price now of playing ball over the Protocol is to be complicit in the dismantling of the Union. It is by paying that price that the Protocol survives. If the price of Stormont is voting to impose EU regulations which we can never change – as UUP and DUP MLAs did last December – and having an Agriculture Minister in Stormont responsible for implementing the Protocol, then those who advocate paying that price demonstrate Stormont matters more to them than defeating the Protocol.
“A Vichy Stormont is of no interest to me.
“If implementing our own destruction is not too high a price to keep the Stormont gravy train afloat what is?
“Furthermore, Unionists need to ask themselves what Stormont is delivering for them. A few months ago the DUP agreed Irish language legislation. What is the next thing Unionists will have to accept to keep Stromont alive? What’s the point of having power if the price is using that power to do things you do not want to do – such as implementing the Protocol?
“What’s the point of devolution if people can legislate over our heads knowing that Unionists will issue press releases about it but fundamentally they will settle down after a while because their political class are so sold on Stormont they will do anything to get it back?
“At what point in the process do you decide that the price is too high? The basis of UUP argument seems to be that there never is such a point.
“The link between making the Belfast Agreement work and making Northern Ireland work is entirely bogus. We keep having political crises precisely because Stormont is designed in such a way as to act as a ratchet to get us out of the United Kingdom.”