The EU's Northern Ireland proposals could break up the UK

At every turn, it seems that progress in the Brexit negotiations is thwarted by the issue of the Irish border. For nearly a year, we’ve been bombarded with jargon about backstops – ‘all-weather backstops’, ‘de-dramatised backstops’ and even the ‘backstop to the backstop’ – until the words have a numbing effect.

If you’re finding it difficult to remember what the problem was in the first place, that could be intentional. Perhaps the EU hopes that British voters will become so bored and bamboozled, that the government feels pressured to sign a deal on Brussels’ terms. Almost every day, we read about some supposed new development in this interminable saga.

Yet, if you ignore all the breathless media reports and Twitter diplomacy, not much has changed on the Irish border impasse since last March.

In December 2017, the government and the EU Commission agreed that a legal ‘backstop’ should be drafted to ensure that no extra border checks or infrastructure would be needed on the island of Ireland after Brexit, if the two sides failed to broker a trade deal.

The initial text suggested this arrangement would require the whole UK to maintain “full alignment” with EU rules, across a limited number of areas affecting “North-South cooperation”, “the all-island economy” and the Good Friday Agreement, in Ireland. The government was coy, to begin with, about the potential impact of this agreement, but its position on the border still broadly reflects the December document.

In contrast, the EU Commission published its idiosyncratic interpretation of the backstop text back in March 2018, insisting that Northern Ireland must remain part of its single market and customs union, even while the rest of the country leaves. Brussels has subsequently dropped some of its more provocative language around this point, but it hasn’t budged on the substance.

Its preferred arrangement would require checks on goods moving between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, creating an internal UK border across the Irish Sea. Understandably, a great deal of commentary has focussed on exactly what these checks might comprise and where they might be situated.

The Commission’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, who described the idea of using hi-tech solutions to maintain a seamless land border in Ireland as “magical thinking”, has talked about “de-dramatising” the Irish sea border with technology. Extraordinarily, Brussels even implied it might waive checks for goods moving from Northern Ireland to the mainland, in an audacious attempt to dress up a policy decision for the British government as an EU concession.

For those who care about the integrity of the United Kingdom, in Ulster and elsewhere, the practicalities of any checks are not the salient point. There are two fundamental questions by which unionists will judge whether any deal on the border is acceptable.

1. Will Northern Ireland take its market rules from Westminster or directly from Brussels?

2. Will any post-Brexit trade deals apply to Northern Ireland on the same terms as the rest of the UK.

The UK will not be a member of the EU and it will not be represented by MEPs, so if Northern Ireland’s rules and tariff regime are determined by Brussels there will not even be an appearance of democratic accountability. Indeed, it’s likely that the Republic of Ireland would be viewed increasingly as a conduit for Ulster’s interests, creating a nascent all-Ireland state by stealth. Meanwhile, Northern Ireland’s economy and politics will drift ever further from the rest of the UK.

It’s not melodramatic to suggest that it could spell the end of the Union as we know it.

The more rabid remainers, the Irish government and Irish nationalists have repeatedly insinuated that the Belfast Agreement is somehow incompatible with leaving the EU, while refusing to cite any of its provisions. But the Good Friday accord is underpinned by the ‘principle of consent’, which determines that the province must remain a full part of the UK, until its people choose explicitly otherwise, in a border poll called by the Northern Ireland Secretary of State.

The British people’s decision to leave the EU was taken through a nationwide referendum as a single political unit, or ‘demos’. That mandate cannot be unpicked by nation or region without destroying the idea that the UK is a sovereign, unitary state. If Northern Ireland cannot leave the EU on the same terms as the rest of the country, the only logical conclusion is that voters here are not considered a full part of the British demos and did not participate in the vote on terms equal with electors in Great Britain.

From that, you could imply that British citizenship in Northern Ireland is at best heavily qualified. At worst, it would become a second-class form of Britishness, that does not allow full participation in the politics, decision-making and economic life of the United Kingdom.

When they’re backed into facing the ineluctable conclusion that the EU is trying effectively to break up their country, ultra-remainers and their separatist allies rely on the dismal logic that, because Britain decided to leave, it’s Britain’s fault that Brussels is attacking the fabric of the UK constitution. It’s an argument that shows startling disregard for the right of our nation to determine its own future. After all, even the power of the EU is supposed to rest, nominally, upon the sovereignty of its member states.

It would be entirely understandable if the public and politicians were weary of Northern Ireland forever being the problem that obstructs progress in the Brexit negotiations. Yet this is actually an issue about the very survival of the UK. Nationalists in Scotland are carefully watching every development with the ‘backstop’, as they strive to loosen their ties with London.

The EU’s proposals are an assault on the bonds that hold together the entire United Kingdom. Whatever relationship finally emerges between Brussels and London, Theresa May’s ‘precious Union’ really could unravel if she allows major differences between the treatment of Great Britain and Northern Ireland after Brexit.