Northern Ireland is the toothless Tories’ latest betrayal

It is not a pretty sight: a political party in free-fall, riddled with scandal and leadership rivalries, widely despised for its dishonesty and its ruling clique’s disregard of the views of its supporters, yet still posing a danger to the Union.

No, not the husk of Sturgeon’s SNP, but the pseudo-Conservative Party that is firmly on course to break the Union through its failure to abolish the Northern Ireland Protocol. Just as the peril to the Union eases on the northern border, it intensifies in the west, as Rishi Sunak’s craven capitulation to Brussels leaves Northern Ireland as a detached, vassal state of the European Union.

The contents of the impertinently named “Windsor Framework” have been examined by the ERG group of Tory MPs’ so-called “Star Chamber”. ERG chairman Mark Francois revealed its conclusions: “The star chamber’s principal findings are: that EU law will still be supreme in Northern Ireland; the rights of its people under the 1800 Act of Union are not restored; the green lane is not really a green lane at all; the Stormont brake is practically useless and the framework itself has no exit, other than through a highly complex legal process.”

So, it’s a real stinker then. Will the ERG members be voting against it? Er – up to a point, Lord Copper… In fact, probably not. The ERG looks likely to demonstrate its toothlessness again, by failing to oppose a measure whose harmfulness to Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom it has forensically dissected. If that seems a contradictory and dishonourable posture, remember that what we are dealing with here is a bunch of Tory MPs.

The Framework was mis-sold to Parliament and the public as the end of the Irish Sea border, a guarantee of no further encroachments on Northern Ireland by EU law, with the “Stormont brake” a powerful veto – all a pack of lies. When Brexit was put to a vote by referendum, it was declared that, if Leave won, we would depart from the EU as one United Kingdom, with no part left behind. Instead, Northern Ireland has been left in the Single Market and subject to EU law – both current and future – with a border still running down the Irish Sea.

This is extremely dangerous for the Union. Slowly, but relentlessly, Northern Ireland is being detached from the United Kingdom. There has been much understandable concern in recent years about the threat to the integrity of the United Kingdom from the aggressive separatism of the SNP; but with that party’s fortunes, at least temporarily, in decline, the more imminent threat comes from the Conservative Party’s betrayal of Northern Ireland.

The question arises: is this because of the Tory elite’s ingrained Remainer sympathies, or does it reflect a private desire to hive off Northern Ireland to the Republic, partly to save £10bn in fiscal deficit, partly out of metropolitan disdain for its culture? That suspicion is beginning to gain credibility, in the light of the appalling Windsor Framework evasion of responsibility by the Conservative government.

The suspicion is that, as census returns show Catholics beginning to outnumber Protestants in the province, Conservative politicians are doing a lazy read-across to imagined electoral intentions, expecting an early referendum vote in favour of Irish reunification. In that false expectation, they may feel it is permissible to leave an EU-compliant infrastructure in place, to make any such change more seamless. If so, they are badly deluded.

It has always been axiomatic that the electorate of Northern Ireland, if it became evident there was a widespread desire for change, would have the right to decide the province’s future by referendum. That right is also enshrined within the Good Friday Agreement. As with Scotland, nobody is attempting to hold Northern Ireland within the UK against the will of its majority. In recent years, however, that will has become increasingly obscured by media trumpeting of demographic changes that no longer have the significance they formerly would have had.

By focusing simplistically on the fact that the Catholic population has slightly outgrown the Protestant, the media have created an expectation of an “inevitable” shift to Irish unification. This has been reinforced by the phenomenon of Sinn Fein becoming the largest party in the currently mothballed Northern Ireland Assembly. In media perception, shallow and lazy in analysis, these developments portend the end of the Union.

That is an illusion. The underlying reality was explored with academic rigour within the past six months by the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, at the University of Notre Dame in America. Twin polls were conducted in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in collaboration with ARINS – Analysing and Researching Ireland North and South, a joint initiative of the Institute at the university’s Keough School of Global Affairs, the Royal Irish Academy and The Irish Times. Polling was carried out by Ipsos and the results were published in The Irish Times.

They were surprising, to say the least. Predictably, 66 per cent of voters in the Republic supported unification with Northern Ireland. However, the results from voters in Northern Ireland showed only 27 per cent in favour of unification and 50 per cent in favour of the Union. That is a margin of support for the Union that any Scottish unionist would give his right arm to attain. Despite the large number of undecided voters, the Unionists’ 50 per cent base would assure success in any referendum.

The study investigated the religious composition of the vote and revealed that 21 per cent of Catholics would vote to remain in the United Kingdom, with just 55 per cent in favour of unification, with another 21 per cent undecided. This shows clearly that the old sectarian binary division has dissolved, making crude interpolations from census returns showing an increased Catholic demographic irrelevant, though 78 per cent of Protestants opposed unification.

Due to the decline in religious affiliation, not all Northern Irish voters could be assigned a confessional identity: these were classed religiously as “Other” and split fairly equally three ways, with 35 per cent against unification and another third undecided. Nowhere, in these carefully researched statistics, is there any evidence to support the view that the much-hyped demographic change in favour of Catholics makes support for the Union precarious.

The most immobile figure is the 78 per cent pro-Union sentiment among the Protestant community, where heritage and tradition remain strong, but that in itself provides a firm base for continued support for the Union. Nor does it discredit the likelihood that many among that large bloc are basing their endorsement of continued membership of the United Kingdom on economic and security considerations, like some of their Catholic fellow citizens.

So, if cynical opportunists within the Conservative Party are promoting the Weasel Framework in the secret hope of ridding themselves of a province they privately regard as a burden, then they are deluded. Northern Ireland clearly wishes to remain British. Yet it has been betrayed by a government that is neither Conservative nor Unionist – just globalist and rudderless.

Beyond that, any so-called Conservative who imagines that the putative departure of Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom could be regarded with equanimity and that mainland Britain could conduct business as usual is positively demented. Let it be clearly understood: the departure of Northern Ireland would instantly be followed by that of Scotland.

Regardless of how shambolic the SNP may look at present, 15 years of nationalist rule have left the separatist mindset deeply embedded in the psyche of many Scots. Seeing Northern Ireland leave would trigger a pro-independence emotional spasm that no considerations of fiscal deficit, currency, security or the prospect of a long drawn-out application for EU membership could contain. Why are we still an English colony while the Irish are leaving? – would be the knee-jerk response, provoking a lemming stampede over the cliff edge.

Why will the Conservative Party not expel Brussels, its regulations, its jobsworths and its courts from Northern Ireland by triggering Article 16? Why will it not stop illegal immigration by leaving the ECHR? Why does it not repeal the Equality Act 2010 and, at a stroke, end all the trans nonsense that is now increasingly endangering children in this country? Why do the Tories insist on trying – and failing – to govern on tramlines laid down by their opponents, instead of tearing up the tracks?

That is now an academic question, since the moribund Tory Party is no longer realistically in the province of psephologists, but of historians. The adhesion this week of Ann Widdecombe and 10 other former Brexit Party MEPs to the Reform UK Party brought that embryonic faction a measure of political experience. It was chilling to listen to their outspoken indictments of this miserably failed government.

The killer argument came from Ben Habib, expressing his ambition “to obliterate the Tory Party” in an interview: “They are not conservative, they are not pro-Brexit and they’re certainly not Unionists… You can’t reward failure with incumbency, down that road lies massive moral hazard. You inculcate bad behaviour and we’ve had too much of that. We’ve had too much of ‘Oh, I know we’re awful, but the other lot are even worse.’ We’ve got to put paid to that. We’re going to boot them out.”

If that seems an extravagant ambition, consider how the Conservatives will be placed at the next election, scrabbling for every possible vote to keep their parliamentary representation in treble figures. A genuinely conservative party such as Reform UK, fielding candidates in every constituency, could unseat a considerable number of Tory MPs.

There have always been two things militating against the success of a new party: the first-past-the-post electoral system and the tendency of voters to cast their ballot not for the party that represents their aspirations (such is the poverty of choice with the legacy parties professing a single globalist liberal ideology), but for the one that seems least alien.

Nothing, at this stage, can yet be done to reform the voting system, but it should now be possible to persuade Tory voters to stop engaging in self-harm by supporting a Conservative Party that has become wholly destructive. In Ben Habib’s words, you can’t reward failure with incumbency. It induces a notion of invulnerability that inflames the undeserving incumbents to even worse betrayal of their supporters.

This week the Conservative Party is betraying Northern Ireland: with 52 weeks in a year, there is adequate time for this infamous imposture of a party to betray many more people, causes and institutions before it is finally derailed by a disgusted electorate.

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