Opinion

Brian Feeney: Pro-protocol majority on Thursday will undermine Johnson and DUP

Boris Johnson was guest speaker at the DUP annual conference in 2018. Picture by Arthur Allison/Pacemaker Press
Boris Johnson was guest speaker at the DUP annual conference in 2018. Picture by Arthur Allison/Pacemaker Press Boris Johnson was guest speaker at the DUP annual conference in 2018. Picture by Arthur Allison/Pacemaker Press

WOLFE Tone’s description of England as ‘the never-failing source of all our political evils’ is as true today as it was 231 years ago.

And it is England, which has been having a collective nervous breakdown in recent years, but more particularly the Conservative party, which has produced the current instability here.

If anything it’s going to get worse from next week, if you can imagine that.

Boris Johnson’s position as prime minister is in peril. Another couple of fines for turning 10 Downing Street into a replica of an American university frat house during lockdown and he could be out.

Some want rid of him by party conference time in the autumn whatever happens. Johnson’s prepared to do anything to hang on.

If that means wrecking the prospects of a new Stormont administration, so what? He has made his attitude towards Ireland north and south abundantly clear over the last six years; it doesn’t matter in his great scheme of things, which is all about Johnson triumphing – though over what is never obvious.

It seems he has decided that the way to hang on as PM is to please the hard-core Brexiteers who elected him party leader after ousting the hapless Theresa May.

Remember, Johnson threw all senior figures opposed to a hard Brexit out of the party. They were replaced with Brexiteers. This is a Brexit government with a cabinet composed of members whose only qualification is abject, unthinking loyalty to Johnson and Brexit.

All you have to do is look at their calibre and you see nothing else commends their presence in a British cabinet.

To please these Brexit zealots, Johnson appears to believe that constant war with the EU is what keeps them onside. To that end we’re told he intends to remove the Irish protocol from British law so that he can rat on the Trade & Cooperation Agreement.

Or at least he believes he can, given the bizarre notion of Brexiteers that British parliamentary sovereignty somehow trumps international law.

To judge from his comments in the leaders’ debates, poor Donaldson and the DUP are led to believe Johnson might do this to satisfy their continued futile quest for a hard British border in Ireland. More fool them.

If, as expected, Johnson announces in the queen’s speech next Tuesday his plan to ‘disapply’ the protocol, it won’t happen at the earliest before the autumn and, as you’ve read here, is unlikely to happen at all, such will be the international reaction. It will go the same way as the aborted 2020 Internal Market Bill.

What that means is no executive while the DUP hang on and hang on, waiting for Johnson to make good his word.

His what? Like Acht na Gaelige, like the bill to give amnesty to veterans, like levelling up, like… you name it, the list of Johnson promises.

Now, the fact is that the protocol is an ingenious mechanism to maximise the north’s economic potential for trading into both GB and EU. That’s a fact recognised by business and agriculture here.

It’s also a way of bypassing the Brexit-induced chaos on the roads to Dover and the delays at Felixstowe.

The majority of parties here also recognise that fact and that’s why there’s a pro-protocol majority in Stormont. What’s important is that on Thursday another pro-protocol majority is returned which will undermine Johnson’s claims and the DUP’s absurdist position.

That’ll do in the short term. The question then arises what will happen when Johnson doesn’t remove the protocol, when his ploy is exposed as yet another bluff? Even if he went ahead he would get stuffed in any international court or in arbitration.

How could he or any successor strike another agreement when the British government is likely to rat on it if they didn’t like how it worked?

On the bright side, the DUP would be confirmed as eejits.