Hard Border ‘Cements-in' the Division of the United Kingdom from Today
‘Permanent’ Border Control Posts Operationalise

A statement by Jim Allister KC MP

From today, the first major, permanent Border Control Post constructed to cement in a ‘hard’ Irish Sea Border, dividing the United Kingdom, will come into service.

The Port of Larne will witness an event of far-reaching constitutional importance for the people of Northern Ireland. The Port of Belfast will follow on 11 August.

Today - despite the false promises of the dud Donaldson/DUP deal - we have imposed on us the experience of being cut off from what has been our Internal Market for Goods, the UK Internal Market for Goods, and of being forced, without consent, into an all-Ireland Internal Market for goods through the coming into service of the first major permanent Border Control Post. Far from ‘safeguarding the Union’, we are experiencing the ‘dismantling of the Union’.

The Border Control Posts stand at the bar of the court of history as concrete evidence that far from our place in the UK Internal Market being protected, it has been replaced with a Great Britain Internal Market for Goods and an All-Ireland Internal Market for Goods.

The UK Internal Market for Goods is now nothing more than a legal fiction to encourage people to live in denial, so the break-up of the Uk can be secured with minimal opposition.

Even under the green lane goods can only cross with an export number, international SPS and customs paperwork, subject to between 10 and 8% checks. Moreover, to the extent that some of the paperwork is simplified compared to the red lane, this is not a net benefit but in return for taking on the costs of alternative border frictions like having to successfully apply and maintain membership of a trusted trader scheme and carry Not for EU labels.

The green lane effectively amounts to an alternative international border experience to the red lane. It certainly does not facilitate the unfettered movement of an internal market that we see in the flow of goods from England to Wales, or Scotland to England today, and which we saw when moving goods from GB to Northern Ireland before the advent of the Irish Sea Border.

As the All-Ireland Internal Market for Goods is defined by laws made by Dublin, and the rest of the EU, which are then simply imposed upon us, these Border Control Posts serve a wholly ignoble purpose. They are there to protect the ‘integrity’ of the consequence of our disenfranchisement and secure the disruption of our best economic interests as we are forcibly alienated from the greater part of what has been our home economy for goods for more than two hundred years.

Today is, as such, a day of humiliation both for the people of Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom as a whole, as we bow to the attempts of 27 European states to disrespect our territorial integrity and degrade our democracy both in direct violation of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement as international law.

This is completely unnecessary because there is a means of delivering Brexit while both respecting the territorial integrity of the United Kingdom and avoiding a hard border along the territorial border between the UK and Republic. It is called Mutual Enforcement and is provided for by my EU Withdrawal Arrangements Bill, currently before Parliament.

Indeed, it was actually developed by the EU and constitutes the only civilised solution if the EU is not to become both the author of the biggest disenfranchisement project in the modern world – taking the vote from 1.9 million people in 300 areas of law – and violator of the foundational principle of international law: ‘Every State shall refrain from any action aimed at the partial or total disruption of the national unity and territorial integrity of any other State or country.’

If the UK is not prepared to stand up for itself and insist on a solution that respects its territorial integrity and does not result in the forced disenfranchisement of 1.9 million citizens, then it is doubtful – certainly under the current government – that it has a future.

For the government of a country to succeed it needs to believe in itself and to defend the dignity of its people.