Why we have to back the backstop

I am an Ulster Protestant, of Unionist extraction, who believes in a United Ireland. There are not all that many of us, but our number is growing by the day. I also believe in a United Europe, which I wish, rather desperately, to see reformed. In this, I am very far from alone. 56 per cent of Ulster voters opted for Remain, and polls suggest that more would do so in the event of a second referendum.

Yet the only voice the British Government listens to in Northern Ireland is the strident monotone of the DUP, which, for reasons that are entirely due to its wish to see a strong border, is obsessively pro-Brexit and whose leader, Arlene Foster, is on record as saying that she would flee the country in the event of Irish unity.

If I could change history, it would be to create a United Ireland inside a United Kingdom inside a United Europe. The Home Rule Bill would have gone through in 1918, leading to meaningful devolution for Ireland and, over time, to similar arrangements for Scotland and Wales, with England, divided into its constituent regions, governed by an English Parliament meeting in the former House of Lords. The federal capital would have been established at Westminster – where else? – with a prime minister and cabinet responsible for defence, foreign policy, national security, constitutional questions and trade.

It would have worked. England would have been better governed and the Celtic trio of Ireland, Scotland and Wales would have been free to develop internally along lines supported by their people.

Membership of the Commonwealth would have been shared. The monarchy would, in all likelihood, have been retained (to the secret delight of a majority of the Irish). And the happy foursome would later have joined in the EEC, helping to lead it into a better, more democratic version of the European Union.

But, as we know, none of this happened. Just bits of it, and badly. And what we have today is a fragmented UK and an Ireland divided against itself.

If I am asked to identify scapegoats, at least in the Irish context, I would single out two: Sinn Fein and the Ulster Unionists.

Sinn Fein fomented rebellion in Dublin in 1916; they later won the civil war against the moderates of the faction formerly identified with Michael Collins, whom they murdered in cold blood. Decades later, they twisted the legitimate civil rights movement in the North into republican insurrection, giving rise to the Troubles in which thousands died. Today, by maintaining their century-old policy of abstention, they refuse to allow their six Westminster MPs in Northern Ireland to vote against Brexit, leaving the path clear for the DUP to masquerade as the sole representatives of the people.

I have no time for the Shinners. They are a political excrescence who have brought no benefit to Ireland north or south. If there was a Hell, that is the place to which I would condemn them.

But the DUP are little better. These soi-disant heirs of Edward Carson – an Irish patriot who regarded partition as an enduring evil – bring to mind the Prince of Wales’s description of modern architecture: a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend. For the party of Arlene Foster and Nigel Dodds is itself an excrescence that, if it ever had usefulness, has long since outlived it.

Most of those who voted Leave in Northern Ireland also vote for the DUP in local and general elections. But not all. Maybe ten percent of DUP-ers (those under 40) opted for Remain, as did many Protestants and Unionists who otherwise give their support to the largely moribund Ulster Unionist Party and the Alliance party. Nearly all Catholics and Nationalists voted Remain. The result, was a decisive pro-Remain majority, by 56 per cent to 44 per cent. Yet ever since then we have heard nothing other than Ulster Says Yes from the DUP, whose dream is of a hard border and a province hard-wired to England.

From Sinn Fein, meanwhile … nothing. Zero. Zilch. For they, too, wish to see a hard border – a border that will be the catalyst for a gilets-jaunes-style all-Ireland rising against the occupation of the North by their old enemy, England.

But the hypocrisy and cant doesn’t end there. There is plenty of it to go around in Westminster as well. Every time I hear Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson banging on about the “sanctity of the Union,” I feel like punching them. Neither of these two gentlemen, nor any others of their ilk in the Tory Party, ever previously gave a damn about Northern Ireland. Rees-Mogg has only been there once. The current Ulster Secretary didn’t even know that most Protestants voted Unionist and most Catholics Nationalist.  Conservative MPs during the Troubles found Ulster politicians, unless they were Old Etonians like Terence O’Neill or James Chichester-Clark, vulgar and tedious, to be avoided in the bars and lobbies of the Palace of Westminster. If they had to choose, they much preferred Gerry Fitt to the Rev Ian Paisley.

Historians have rightly condemned a succession of Westminster governments, including Labour administrations, for ignoring what was going on in Northern Ireland during the lifetime of the Orange State. “What a bloody awful country! – the judgment of Home Secretary Reginald Maudling after a brief tour of inspection – best sums up the attitude they displayed in respect of what remained of John Bull’s Other Island.

Today, though, the DUP holds the balance of power. Without Nigel Dodds and his nine not-so-trusty stalwarts, Theresa May couldn’t function as prime minister, making her their prisoner when it comes to Brexit. Without the DUP, the Backstop would have been agreed 12 months ago, leading to an orderly departure along the lines set out by Theresa May.

The point of the Backstop is to ensure that Britain’s departure from the EU doesn’t reintroduce a hard Irish border, with customs checks, queues of truck and private cars and a revived network of approved and unapproved frontier crossings. By keeping NI within the customs union, the idea was that Ireland would remain a single market, able to trade much as it does today but with the Irish Sea as the effective, if largely notional, frontier between the UK and both Ireland and the EU. Northern Ireland would continue to be part of the UK. It would continue to sends its MPs to Westminster. But its external trade would be regulated by Brussels, not London or Dublin.

The DUP turned this sensible, if sensitive, proposal, which has the endorsement of the province’s business and farming communities, into an existential question. They were having none of it. What they wanted was a proper land border, with uniformed officers sticking out their hands to demand of drivers to stop and be recognised. They deny this, naturally. They say that they are totally, one hundred percent opposed to the restoration of a hard border. But they are lying. Only with their people coralled within such an enclosed frontier do they see any chance of preserving the Union for future generations. “Not an inch” was the battle cry of the Ulster Volunteer Force in 1912, and little has changed since.

But the fact is that demography has changed. Within ten years, there will be more Catholic/Nationalist voters than Protestant/Unionist voters. Not all Catholics wish to be rid of the Union. They have to think of their pensions and their jobs in the public service, as well as of the instability that would result from a vote in favour of a United Ireland. But the clock is ticking in Belfast and Derry as well as in London and Brussels.

No one has any affection for the Backstop. It is a Brussels lash-up of the sort that drew from the former Irish Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald the memorable observation, “I can see how that would work in practice, but how would it work in theory?” The thing is that it cannot be wished away without an alternative that works. Tories claim they are outraged by it on the basis that it distinguishes between two parts of the United Kingdom. In fact, they are annoyed because the only alternative so far on offer is that the whole of the UK should remain within the Customs Union. They cannot abide the fact that the tail is wagging the dog, but haven’t the guts to say so, preferring to hide behind the appearance of an all-inclusive Unionism.

Well, I have news for the good folk of Ulster, of whatever political hue. The only true Tory Unionists are Conservative MPs in Scotland, plus the ghost of Enoch Powell. Most Brexiteers would vote for Irish unity in a second if it meant that they could get out of Europe on their own terms. They are only prevented from making their feelings plain by the fact that without the support of the DUP, they could end up with Jeremy Corbyn in Downing Street.

As ever, the Tory party, most of whose members couldn’t give a stuff about Ireland, is bound to the Irish Question like Perseus to his rock. And I doubt they even appreciate the irony.