Brexit was supposed to be about sovereignty, not dismembering our nation | thearticle

With parliament set to vote on Boris Johnson’s deal tomorrow, it’s a good time to recall what Brexit was originally supposed to be about. The Leave campaign attracted support for all sorts

of reasons, but its most powerful message was a promise to “take back control” of Britain’s future. Brexit was primarily about reasserting national sovereignty. It was not supposed to

involve dismembering the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The idea of a buccaneering, free-trading Britain was raised during the campaign, but it wasn’t its

centre-piece. Indeed, many Brexiteers, who later put this at the heart of their vision, at first suggested we should stay closely aligned with the single market, with a relationship to the

EU similar to Norway or Switzerland. Taking that into account – and disregarding the understandable excitement that an agreement has finally been reached – Boris Johnson’s deal is not an

impressive achievement. Indeed, in many aspects, it is worse than the mess negotiated by Theresa May. The deal’s greatest failing is that it undermines the integrity of the United Kingdom.

Some commentators seem happy to explain away this weakness as a necessary compromise or a minor consideration, but it seems self-defeating to wrest back national sovereignty and in the

process weaken our nation-state. Last year, Boris Johnson attacked Theresa May’s backstop at the DUP conference, telling delegates, “we would be damaging the fabric of the Union with

regulatory checks and even customs controls between Great Britain and Northern Ireland on top of those extra regulatory checks down the Irish Sea that are already envisaged in the Withdrawal

Agreement. Now I have to tell you that no British Conservative government could or should sign up to any such arrangement.” Under the prime minister’s deal, regulatory checks will take

place on products moving from the mainland to Ulster, and, in addition to customs checks, many categories of goods will attract tariffs up-front. I know we’re not supposed to take seriously

anything that Boris says. I know his flourishes and overblown rhetoric are usually intended to entertain rather than inform, but can he really have issued his warning about the Union so

flippantly? There is a tendency, worsened by Twitter and social media, to treat politics as if it were a spectator sport. The attachment of many supporters to their political party seems as

un-budging as the loyalty of football fans to their club. For these people, Brexit is as compelling as a high-scoring final and Boris has just scored a last-minute winner for the

Conservatives. The spectacle is not so entertaining viewed from Northern Ireland, where, in recent memory, people were bombed and shot for protecting the province’s place in the United

Kingdom. The idea that, because the Irish border is disputed, unionists must accept a diluted Brexit that distances them from the rest of the country is facile and offensive. The May deal

was a threat to Northern Ireland’s place in the UK, but at least it maintained the pretext that the backstop would never be used; that it was intended as an ‘insurance policy’ in case a

trade agreement could not be reached. It was dangerous and dishonest because it used the border issue as an excuse to lock Great Britain into a close customs relationship with the EU – but

even if that aim was underhand and could be overturned by another government, it meant drastic differences between the mainland and Ulster were unlikely, in the short term at least. Many

unionists were suspicious that Boris Johnson would be tempted by a Northern Ireland only backstop, that left Great Britain free to diverge drastically from the EU’s customs and regulatory

regime. Instead, he removed the backstop completely by making its most odious features permanent. Not a master-stroke of negotiation, by any means. The features that partly redeem the

agreement, like Northern Ireland’s ability to participate in UK wide trade deals, should never have been in question in the first place. We will be treated differently for the purposes of

customs, VAT and regulations. We are effectively being pushed out of the UK economy and into an all-Ireland arrangement that will skew political and social life here forever. The DUP’s

fixation with ‘consent’ is a distraction that betrays the party’s Ulster nationalist roots. The people of Northern Ireland never had a mandate to separately determine the province’s

relationship with the EU, and they don’t have one now. They have a right to decide whether their region stays in the UK, or whether it instead joins the Irish republic, to form an all-island

state. They have a right too, to take part in a nationwide political process, like Brexit, on the same basis as voters elsewhere in the country. If we are treated differently, as the UK

leaves the EU, British citizenship in Northern Ireland means something different than in the rest of the country.