Brian Wilson: Johnson's hard Brexit is a curse on Northern Ireland – and everywhere else, too

Mrs May did not miss her chance. She recalled: “I put a deal before the House that met the requirements of the Good Friday agreement and enabled us not to have a border down the Irish sea or between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Sadly, the Democratic Unionist Party and others across the House chose to reject that”.

It was a simple statement of fact which not only punctured Sir Jeffrey but should remind us of how cynicism and stupidity combined to create a problem that could have been avoided, even after Brexit had happened and which, for good measure, gave us Boris Johnson and a government dominated by hardline Brexiteers.

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We have had a pandemic since then, which tends to blur the memory, but the Irish border problem was always going to come back to bite those who pretended it could be ignored. To gain power, Johnson and his acolytes simply lied about how it would be wished away and now seek to dress up that cynicism as high principle.

Threatening unilateral action to breach the Treaty with the EU is another folly to be paid for in terms of prosperity, jobs and possibly worse. There is room for careful negotiation to patch together some workable compromise, as urged not only by the Irish government but also Northern Ireland’s own business community. So who does the bellicosity of Johnson and Truss actually represent? The self-destructive DUP?

When it comes to stupidity, nobody can compete with the DUP. They had absolutely nothing to gain from Brexit but basic reactionary instincts led them to support it. They had much to fear from Boris Johnson’s rampant opportunism but still opened the door to him by repeatedly rejecting Mrs May’s back-stop.

For good measure, they succeeded in the near impossible by turning themselves into losers in a Northern Ireland election by splitting the Unionist vote while all Sinn Fein had to do was stand still in order to become the biggest party. And Sir Jeffrey still has the cheek to accuse Mrs May of being a threat to the Good Friday agreement.

If the DUP is worried about the Good Friday agreement it should now do what democrats are expected to do which is accept the result of the Assembly elections and get on with it. They need the humility to recognise the self-inflicted folly which determined their current fate. The cry may have been “no surrender” but the reality was “no common sense”.

Neither, however, should we forget the role of “others across the House” to whom Mrs May referred. Back in 2018, these included the great majority of Labour MPs as well as the SNP and Liberal Democrats. All of them were nominally opposed to a “hard Brexit” but in practice achieved just that by voting with right-wing Tories to effectively oust Theresa May, along with her backstop.

That history should not be forgotten too easily. The backstop would have kept Britain in a common customs territory with the EU until some better idea emerged to deal with the Irish conundrum – i.e. indefinitely. The pro-Brexit Tories saw that as a device to frustrate their ambition of a complete break with the EU, which is exactly why every other party should have supported it, rather than sharing a division lobby with the Brexit fanatics.

Labour, under the catastrophic leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, was supposedly motivated by a desire to force a General Election which, according to fantasy, they might win. Of course, the exact opposite happened. By opposing the backstop, they got rid of May, suffered the worst General Election result since 1935 and ensured the hardest and most damaging of Brexits.

The SNP also hid behind an entirely bogus position of principle. As a pro-EU party, they were not prepared to vote for any accommodation with Brexit. By then, however, Brexit was the reality and the question was one of damage limitation. Staying within a Customs union would have protected Scotland, along with the rest of the UK. Their strategic preference was to usher in Johnson and then hope to harvest the hostility.

There are, however, dangers in using Northern Ireland as a pawn in any political game – a fact that should have been given far higher recognition by those who drove Brexit in the first place. An island divided between EU and non-EU territory was always going to create tensions which had been gradually eroded along with the removal of a physical border. Brexit has become a curse upon that process with no compensatory benefits for Northern Ireland and precious few for anywhere else.

It seems that legislation to allow the Johnson government to renege on the Withdrawal Treaty will be a long drawn-out affair. Hopefully this will allow time for diplomatic efforts to establish some kind of accommodation which will both preserve the integrity of the EU and limit the economic damage to Northern Ireland.

In the meantime, Stormont should be allowed to function since the overwhelming priorities of people in Northern Ireland are not primarily around the constitution – any more than in Scotland or the rest of the UK – but about the dire state of the health service and the cost of living. Politicians who draw their salaries must also allow government to function.

For MPs of all parties who facilitated the current imbroglio by rejecting Theresa May’s backstop, there is both a moral and political obligation to make amends. That certainly won’t be achieved by supporting unilateral acts of petulance. In Northern Ireland as elsewhere, re-building bridges that Brexit was intended to destroy would be the better option.

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