What is wrong with Kate Hoey? The Labour member for Vauxhall, who was my MP for most of the time I lived in London, has been a eurosceptic for many years and a dislocated Ulster Unionist for longer than that.
Since the referendum, however, she has come out increasingly as a hard Brexiteer and an even harder-line Unionist. This week, her twin obsessions have fused. Frustrated by the emergence of the Irish Border question as an obstacle on the road to a clean break with the European Union, she has opted to rubbish the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to her beloved Province and to join with those who believe that decisions on its future should be taken at Westminster, without reference to Sinn Fein or the Dublin Government.
“I think there is a need for a cold rational look at the Belfast agreement,” she told the Huffington Post on Monday. “Mandatory coalition is not sustainable in the long term. We need to face reality. Sinn Féin don’t particularly want a successful Northern Ireland. They want a united Ireland.”
Hoey is as entitled to her opinions as I am to mine. Like me, she was born and raised in the Protestant heartland of Northern Ireland, ending up as a Labour politician largely because, having stayed on in the UK after graduating from what is now London Metropolitan University, she was able, more easily, to pursue her interests in sport, education and – yes – international marxism.
But for her to use her cover as a Labour MP to conceal the fact that she is, at heart, as much of a Democratic Unionist as Arlene Foster or Ian Paisley Jr is, frankly, offensive. She is on record as dismissing the Republic of Ireland as a “foreign” country, whose culture she finds alien to her British nature. She has no time for Sinn Fein, less, almost, because of its links to the IRA than because it represents a view of her identity that she does not recognise and support for a community – the Nationalist people – which makes up close to half of the population of Northern Ireland.
When the Belfast Agreement was signed in 1998, it had various strands, one of which was predicated on the UK and Ireland’s joint membership of the EU. Brexit undermines this assumption, raising once more the prospect – many would say, the certainty – of a hard border running from Derry to Newry, both of which, as it happens, are strongly nationalist.
Theresa May and Leo Varadkar, the Irish prime minister, are keenly aware of the difficulty, and, in fairness, are committed to finding a solution. This week, indeed, talks are taking place in Brussels aimed at maintaining a frictionless frontier.
The negotiatons are already delicate enough. The last thing they need is a crass intervention by Hoey in which she combines her keen desire for a Britain freed from the tyranny of Europe and a Northern Ireland that, as Margaret Thatcher once remarked, is as British as Finchley.
The Antrim-born MP, whose south London constituency vote 78 per cent for Remain, told the Irish Times last year that she would cheer for England over Ireland at rugby. “I don’t feel that Irish thing,” she said. “I like some Irish music. I like Daniel O’Donnell (a Christian country singer). Does that make me Irish?” On the larger question of who belongs to what, all ambiguity is put to one side. “I’ll do anything to make sure that the United Kingdom has Northern Ireland as an integral part of it on the same terms as any other part of the United Kingdom when we leave the EU.”
Anything? Now, it would seem, she is even prepared to question the underpinnings of peace.
In Hoey’s worldview, a free and independent Britain under the Union flag seems more important than any negotiated settlement requiring recognition of the European Court of Justice. She wants the UK out hook, line and sinker. At the same time, she would like the Catholic/Nationalist community in the North either – ideally – to accept that Ulster is British and will remain British forever or, as diehard Unionists used to say, that they should clear off over the Border and see how they like living in a country run by the Catholic Church and the Gaelic Athletic League.
Calmer voices in the Labour Party, as well as Simon Coveney, the deputy prime minister in Dublin, have made clear that they find Hoey’s intervention “reckless” and unworkable. The Good Friday Agreement, they say, is for all its faults, the foundation of peace in Northern Ireland. The DUP and Sinn Fein, most critics agree, are equally to blame for the impasse that has prevented the formation of a Stomont Executive for the past 14 months. Both need a kick up the backside. But to pretend that the pact, which ended 30 years of violent struggle, can be set to one side now in pursuit of Brexit is irresponsible in the extreme. Hoey should apologise and then keep her mouth shut until more moderate voices on all sides find ways through the present political morass.
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Iain Martin and the team make sense of the news, providing commentary and analysis on the stories that matter in politics, geopolitics, economics and culture.