Owen Polley: Unionists should stand firm if the deal over the Northern Ireland Protocol is not right

Those cliches were deployed frequently last week, as the government tried to close a deal with the EU. And they will become more venomous if the DUP rejects the latest incarnation of an agreement that Rishi Sunak claimed yesterday he is “giving it everything” to secure.

The prime minister implies he’s made progress in negotiations over the past week, but he has not substantiated that yet with any detail.

A recent editorial in The Times urged Sir Jeffrey Donaldson's party to avoid ‘constitutional purism’ and ‘wise up’ by agreeing to whatever arrangements the government negotiates with the EU. The DUP is a particular target because it collapsed Stormont in protest against the protocol.

Even before that, though, the party’s critics depicted it as a group of hardline Brexiteers that could scarcely be reasoned with. They claimed that it had rejected fair-minded proposals in the past, ending up with the Protocol only because of its own obstinacy and stupidity.

It’s true that one or two of the DUP’s most vocal MPs were avid Leavers. They cultivated links with like-minded politicians on the Tories’ eurosceptic wing and pressed the government to make a clean break from Brussels, even when that carried risks for the Union.

That helped shape the perception that the whole party pushed for the hardest of ‘hard Brexits’, when, in fact, it only ever issued one red line: that Northern Ireland should be treated the same as the rest of the UK. One outcome that was never offered by the government.

Unionists’ anxieties about Sunak’s deal are anything but pedantic and abstract. They are concerned with fundamental building blocks of the constitution – who makes laws for Northern Ireland, who exercises powers over taxation and to which market we belong.

It’s not true, either, to claim that the DUP was forced into this position because it turned down better proposals that would have avoided compromising our constitutional position. This argument is used to defend the Withdrawal Agreement negotiated by Theresa May that Westminster voted down three times during 2019.

It’s often claimed that the ‘backstop’ she agreed was a deal to keep the whole UK tied permanently to the EU’s customs union and single market. It was no such thing, nor was it a selfless gesture from the government, intended to protect peace here.

The backstop was, quite explicitly, an ‘insurance policy’ that meant Northern Ireland alone would be forced to stick to Brussels’ rules, and endure customs checks and tariffs, if Great Britain diverged from the European Union. It included every controversial element of Boris Johnson’s subsequent Northern Ireland Protocol that made unionists feel like they were being pushed away from the rest of the UK.

The only meaningful difference was that, in the short-term, the government said it would tie the whole country to the EU, to prevent it being needed. The UK’s chief negotiator at the time, Olly Robbins, let slip May’s thinking when he described the backstop as a ‘bridge’ to a more permanent customs arrangement for Britain.

Northern Ireland’s unionists were asked to support a deal, devised by a prime minister who didn’t have a working majority, that used the province as an excuse to foist an unpopular arrangement on the whole UK. To make things worse, it included an Irish Sea border that would kick in as soon as the government took a different policy direction, and officially booted Northern Ireland out of the UK’s customs union.

Although the current protocol requires us to adhere to EU customs law, we are at least theoretically still within the UK’s customs area.

It’s only through a combination of wilful ignorance and wisdom in hindsight that unionists can be accused of spurning an opportunity, by opposing the 2019 Withdrawal Agreement. All the constitutional objections that were eventually levelled at Boris Johnson’s Northern Ireland Protocol were just as relevant to Theresa May’s backstop.

That’s not to say that unionists don’t share some blame for these fallacies becoming established. The DUP showed confusion over parts of the proposed deals and made critical mistakes, like accepting a regulatory border in principle and even flirting, briefly, with promoting the protocol as the ‘best of both worlds’.

Some of their more liberal pro-Union counterparts, including figures in the UUP, meanwhile, came close to encouraging the idea that Northern Ireland should be used to manoeuvre the rest of the UK into a closer relationship with the EU.

Similarly, more recently, the UUP asked for local parties to have a direct role in negotiations with Brussels, while both parties spoke about the protocol creating a ‘democratic deficit’ here.

They mean, of course, that it allows unaccountable officials in Brussels to impose laws on Northern Ireland, but it was always a foolhardy choice of words to describe this problem. Now, Michael Martin and others talk about addressing the issue by involving us more in EU decision-making. I.e. tying us closer to the EU and pushing us further from mainstream UK politics - the exact opposite of repairing the Union.

Unionists’ concerns about any protocol deal are absolutely valid, but they could have expressed them much better, in order to court sympathy in London and avoid unintended consequences. Due to these past failures they may have to remain stubborn and risk making themselves unpopular for a little longer.