A TUV delegation comprising of party leader Jim Allister, Ballymena Councillor Matthew Armstrong and party press officer Samuel Morrison met the Secretary of State yesterday.
Speaking afterwards Jim Allister said:
“We left the Secretary of State in no doubt that Unionists are never going to accept a Conservative and Unionist government’s attempts to dismantle the Union by way of a border in the Irish Sea, a border which, as we told Mr Lewis to his face, the Secretary of State lied about.
“This is not a matter of grace periods and derogations but fundamentally a constitutional one. There has been a transfer of sovereignty. The people of Northern Ireland, as rule takers from Brussels, are now governed by laws into which they have no input. That is a constitutional outrage that no free people can bear. Unionists recognise that the evil genius of the Protocol is to create economic unity on the island of Ireland as a stepping stone towards political unity. As we told Mr Lewis, we have lost our equal citizenship within the United Kingdom. We asked how he thought his constituents would feel if they found that they had to fill out paperwork to send goods to another part of England.
“We also made it clear that having bowed to the threat of violence the Government had sent a very dangerous message to the community about what it takes to make them sit up and take notice.
“Tellingly, there was no significant response from Mr Lewis to any of these points.
“TUV also took the opportunity to articulate our strong opposition to the undermining of devolution caused by the NIO’s moves to impose an extreme abortion regime on Northern Ireland over our heads.
“Councillor Armstrong focused on the problems with policing and the difficulty Unionists now face in saying that loyalists must act within the law when they saw with their own eyes the mass breaking of the law at the Storey funeral, something which was facilitated by the PSNI whose actions fatally undermined any prospect of prosecutions.
“We concluded the meeting by making it clear that with the Protocol and the issues relating to two tier policing we were heading towards a perfect storm of Unionist anger. There was an onus on the Government to address the primary cause, the Protocol. It must go.
“We saw no evidence that the Secretary of State is making serious efforts to address Unionist concerns and frankly left the meeting confirmed in our belief that robust, sustained political action is necessary in order to make London sit up and take notice. Implementing the Protocol will have the opposite effect.”