By Jamie Bryson.
It has been one year since power-sharing in Northern Ireland was restored, following the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) accepting a role in implementing the Irish Sea border.
This decision was made against the wishes of many within the unionist community and senior members of their own party, in exchange for a series of superficial promises contained in a command paper titled Safeguarding the Union—mockingly renamed by many unionists as Surrendering the Union.
Twelve months on from that deal, not even the DUP itself continues to stand over the claims both it, and the Sunak Government, made.
The Irish Sea border remains, with more checks than ever on goods moving between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Customs declarations are now required even for goods or parcels that stay within the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, the pipeline of EU law continues to flow, allowing a foreign entity—with no democratic mandate in the UK—to impose its authority over Northern Ireland in more than 300 areas of law. The primacy of EU law is so entrenched that it even overrides Acts of the sovereign UK Parliament, including the Legacy Act and the Illegal Migration Act.
The Irish Sea border remains, with more checks than ever on goods moving between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
These are just some issues which confound the most deceptive claims made in the deal. It goes without saying therefore that the basis upon which power sharing presently rests in Northern Ireland is shifting sand.
It was only last week the impotence of the so-called ‘Stormont Brake’ was laid bare. This was presented by the DUP and Sunak Government as a tool by which the Northern Ireland Assembly, with 30 MLAs from two parties, could block amending EU law. This, it was claimed, ended dynamic alignment or put another way, “cut the pipeline of EU law”.
This was always a distinctly dubious claim given the brake in truth operated as nothing more than a ‘power to petition’ the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. It was predictable that when that petition reached the desk of Hillary Benn (he of ‘Surrender Act’ infamy who tried to stop the UK leaving the EU at all in defiance of 17.5 million people’s democratic wishes) that it would be rejected, and rejected it was. The consequence of course is that EU law on matters of trade (the Stormont Brake only purports to cover the trading areas of law found in Annex 2 of the Protocol/Windsor Framework) continues to flow unabated into Northern Ireland.
There is an even more potent flow of law via Article 2 of the Protocol which is an open-textured pipeline of EU law falling under the broad heading of ‘civil rights’ (read in conjunction with the equally open-textured and broad ‘rights’ chapter of the Belfast Agreement). This encompasses areas as broad as employment, discrimination, the legacy of the troubles and UK immigration policy.
If any measure of UK law is inconsistent with EU law, then the EU law prevails and the effect is the disapplication of the UK law. In the past year two Acts of Parliament have been struck down in Northern Ireland owing to EU law: the Legacy Act and the Illegal Migration Act. This has overridden the democratic will of the British Parliament in respect of protecting veterans from a one-sided criminal justice witch hunt arising from troubles-related incidents, and immigration policy.
In discussing the effect of the trading arrangements on Northern Ireland, Lord Justice McCloskey who is one of four Lord Justices of Appeal in Northern Ireland said in the Allister case that Northern Ireland belongs more to the EU market than the UK market.
That logic surely transfers also to the issues under Article 2, again placing Northern Ireland in the EU legal orbit on important issues such as immigration, meaning that the Irish Sea customs border will inevitably become an Irish Sea immigration border. There is no other sovereign territory in the world in which two immigration regimes operate within the same territory.
The Labour party’s ‘solution’ to these issues is to use Northern Ireland as a ratchet to bring the entire UK into alignment with the EU legal regime. This is a dangerous game for all those of us who value the Union because this approach pitches Northern Ireland’s place in the Union against the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union.
The Labour party’s ‘solution’ to these issues is to use Northern Ireland as a ratchet to bring the entire UK into alignment with the EU legal regime.
In brief compass, the choice becomes fulfillment of the democratic will of the British people to leave the European Union, the price of which is the eroding of Northern Ireland’s place in our UK Union, or to keep Northern Ireland as part of the UK, but to use that objective as a means by which to de-facto overturn Brexit in substance and trap the whole UK under the EU’s legal orbit.
It seems obvious to point out that the latter approach risks building resentment in GB against Northern Ireland, and the former approach destroys the UK as a Union in any event by virtue of an ever expanding border in the Irish Sea which increasingly leaves Northern Ireland under EU colonial rule.
The Labour Party’s trickery is based on a fundamentally flawed premise. Why should the people of the United Kingdom have to barter with the EU over part of our own sovereignty territory, which that foreign power wishes to control as some kind of colony?
In the greatest democratic turnout ever in the United Kingdom, the people voted to leave the European Union. The means the entire United Kingdom, not part of it.
It is the duty of all those who wish to respect the referendum result of 2016, which all democrats surely must, and those who value our precious Union, to continue to fight to free Northern Ireland from the ever more deeply embedding tentacles of the EU and ensure that Brexit is firmly and finally done: that means the whole UK is out-with the control of the EU and free of those foreign laws and diktats.
Jamie Bryson works in public relations and law. He is Director of Policy for Unionist Voice Policy Studies and NI Director for the Centre for the Union. Follow Jamie Bryson on Twitter / X here.
