EU plan will put N Ireland behind trade wall and ruin Union
Our Union is more than its common institutions, common history and its four constituent members. Our Union is one of the largest economies in the world, built on its own single market. The primary market for what Northern Ireland produces is elsewhere in the UK, as it is for Scotland.
What is good for the GB economy is good for NI business. This is why we wish to see a new global UK succeed, with economic imbalances addressed through bold initiatives like the Northern Powerhouse.
A key part of that global approach will be free-trade agreements. For Northern Ireland’s people and economy to contribute, participate and benefit from this, it needs to maintain free and unfettered access to and from Great Britain and be a full beneficiary of them.
What the EU is demanding is NI left outside looking in at the meal.
This is not sustainable constitutionally or economically. “Best of both worlds” is the spin being put on the EU’S position. Best of both would be wonderful, but it is a lie. Northern Ireland, one of the weaker economic regions of the UK, would be required to enact all EU regulation with no say in its preparation, bearing all the costs, and out of the UK’S new trade relationships – an economic Hotel California.
Year after year, the differences with Great Britain would be widening and the harmonisation with the Republic of Ireland growing.
We have not been offered, and will not be granted, some modern day Roman citizenship, free to roam all the markets of the UK and the EU27 unmolested. We will be the prisoner of one, with a trade wall inexorably descending on the Irish Sea.
If a vassal parliament in London is unacceptable, and a breach with the referendum result, why is reducing another UK political institution to vassal status any less of a breach?
The danger does not stop with Northern Ireland and the Union. Nicola Sturgeon jumped on Brussels’ briefings about NI in the single market to demand the same in order to advance their independence agenda.
The Government and the Opposition have both said such a carve-up is unacceptable. In their negotiation strategy, the EU has persisted. The common UK determination shown so far on this must be maintained. It is time for the EU to move, and move substantively.
If they do not, then we may have to listen to the advice of John F Kennedy that: “We cannot negotiate with people who say what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable.”