Arlene’s fury at former PMs for using Troubles to attack Brexit

ARLENE Foster yesterday condemned Tony Blair and Sir John Major for stoking fears about the return of violence in Northern Ireland.

The DUP leader said their warnings over how Brexit could threaten the peace process were an ‘insult’ to voters in the region.

The former prime ministers have voiced concerns about the possibility of border controls being reinstated between the North and the Irish Republic.

Speaking at the British Chambers of Commerce annual conference in London, Mrs Foster said: ‘I object in the strongest possible terms to people who have limited experience of the Troubles in Northern Ireland throwing threats of violence around as some kind of bargaining chip in this negotiating process.

‘To do so is an insult to the people of Northern Ireland who worked so hard to bring peace to our country.’

Mrs Foster, whose party props up Theresa May’s Government in the House of Commons, insisted she did not want to see the imposition of a ‘hard border” after Britain leaves the EU.

At the same time she reaffirmed her party’s objection to the EU’s ‘ fallback’ plan – which would effectively keep Northern Ireland in the single market if the two sides were unable to resolve the border issue.

‘I want to see an optimistic, sensible and pragmatic approach to Brexit,’ she said.

In a newspaper article last weekend, former Tory prime minister Sir John wrote: ‘Peace – together with mutual British and Irish membership of the EU – has ushered in a finer relationship between Dublin and London than we have ever known in the past.

‘Now, unless we proceed with

‘Used as a bargaining chip’

care, Brexit may undermine it.’ Mr Blair last week accused voters of being prepared to give up peace in Northern Ireland for Brexit.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘I find it not just disappointing but sickening that people should really be prepared to sacrifice peace in Northern Ireland on the altar of Brexit.’

Speaking outside the conference last night, Mrs Foster described Sir John and Mr Blair’s interventions as ‘galling’ and said they ‘should know better’.

She added that they ‘ need to understand the Northern Ireland of today, not the 1980s’.

Boris Johnson declared last night that it will be possible to have ‘very, very minimal controls’ on the border of Northern Ireland.

The Foreign Secretary said there was ‘no need’ for a return to a hard Irish border.

However, his suggestion of some form of controls post-Brexit could provoke a row.

Last summer, the Government said there should be no physical infrastructure, such as customs posts, at the border, which has almost 300 crossing points. In a position paper, ministers said they did not envisage CCTV cameras or number-plate recognition technology around the border.

Mr Johnson said the issue ‘ has understandably a great deal of political, emotional charge’ and it was ‘all too forgivable for politicians to wish to be absolutely certain about how things will work’.

European Council president Donald Tusk yesterday warned that EU negotiations could grind to a halt if UK proposals to prevent a hard border are not put forward within weeks.

FIRST time I’ve seen Northern Irish leader Arlene Foster speak in the flesh. Impressed. She was at the British Chambers of Commerce conference. The morning had dribbled by without much to note. But when Mrs Foster arrived at the lectern just before lunch she made an obvious impact.

The business audience stopped toying with their mobiles. You could sense them thinking ‘hmmn, this one’s at least a grown-up, and tough’.

The BCC represents small businesses and is more entrepreneurial than the Confederation of British Industry. CBI conferences are infested by sharpsuited careerists haloed by eau de cologne. The BCC lot are older, mouldier, less corporate.

An initially breathless Liam Fox, arriving with seconds to spare, had been the morning’s first guest. He gave a breezy, can-do speech which argued that the gloomsters saying Britain was heading for a ‘black hole’ were wrong.

Foreign investment was at a record high, as were tech startups and employment, with manufacturing booming. ‘Some black hole!’ said Dr Fox. Eurocrat briefings about how Britain would be punished for Brexit were ‘not the language of a club but the language of a gang’.

After Fox, the turkey: Rebecca Long-Bailey, 38, Labour’s trade spokesman. For ten minutes she shouted at these hardened business leaders, lecturing them on how to run their firms.

When, in her Mrs Merton voice, she started talking of her ‘mission orientated industrial strategy’, a businesswoman in front of me laughed in contempt. Ms Wrong-Daily sounded unfamiliar with both numbers and her text – she managed to turn ‘ scourge’ into two syllables.

‘It’s been an absolute pleasure,’ she yacked as she ended. The feeling was not exactly mutual and she departed for her Salford & Eccles constituency without any pause for questions.

Relief (of a sort) was provided by a suit from the Drax energy group, one of the day’s sponsors. He gave a marvellously leaden speech which included the American jargon ‘prosumers’. Conference organiser Adam Marshall later said it was ‘a word we all need to come to terms with’. But not use, please.

Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell was given 20 minutes to rattle through a speech which tried to assure this capitalist audience that his socialism would not wreck the economy. It included the phrase ‘rentiers and speculators’, a term generally used only by hard-Left political theorists. Mr McDonnell did at least earn a laugh when he turned to International Women’s Day and tried to talk about ‘the glass ceiling’ – and it came out as ‘the glass seagull’.

ANDthen Mrs Foster. She is not an MP but she leads the Democratic Unionist Party and is therefore vital to Theresa May, whose government depends on the DUP for parliamentary numbers. She took to the stage within a few seconds of IRA-admirer McDonnell’s departure. She drily observed that it was at least unlikely that she would be repeating anything he had said.

Though the audience had heard Mr McDonnell with respect, it warmed to her. She spoke in an unhurried, positive way about Brexit and what it could bring.

There was something unshowy, grounded, adult about her. She sounded about 40 years older than Ms Long-Bailey, even though there are only nine years between them.

She explained how she had been brought up on a farm in County Fermanagh, and how her ‘Daddy’, a policeman, had one evening crawled into the kitchen at her home on all fours, stained in blood, having been shot by the IRA. As a girl she was also in a bus attacked by the Provos. A child near her was badly hurt.

‘I don’t want to see a hard border,’ she growled, but it angered her, and it was ‘an insult to the people of Northern Ireland’, to hear the border issue being used ‘as some kind of bargaining chip’ by people who had hardly ever stepped foot on the island of Ireland.

Utter silence in the hall. A powerful moment.