On 6 May Sinn Fein became the first nationalist party to win the most votes in Stormont elections, and therefore nominate a speaker and first minister since the creation of the Northern Ireland statelet 101 years ago. Under power-sharing arrangements in the Six Counties in the north of Ireland, Stormont can now only function if the unionist party with the most votes, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), nominates the deputy speaker and deputy first minister. The DUP is refusing to do so unless the Northern Ireland Protocol is thrown out, giving the British government the pretext for trying to override its international agreement with the EU. On 17 May Foreign Secretary Liz Truss announced in Parliament that Britain plans to take unilateral measures to overturn the Protocol.
The Protocol, part of the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement, keeps the north of Ireland in the EU single market and customs union, while Britain has left both. The Six Counties shares a land border with the 26 Counties in the south of Ireland which is an EU-member state. To avoid breaching the Good Friday Agreement by having a hard border between the Six and the 26 Counties, the Protocol requires checks on goods travelling between Britain and the north of Ireland to take place at ports in Belfast.
No Stormont
Britain specifically designed the statelet to ensure a unionist majority with unionist rule. Sinn Fein’s win in the Stormont elections is a historic victory, though largely symbolic because Sinn Fein has been the biggest nationalist party in Stormont holding the positions of deputy speaker and deputy first minister, since 2007.
The Assembly has been unable to reconvene since the election because of the DUP’s refusal to nominate for Stormont positions. They have up to six months to nominate; if they do not a new election will have to be called.
Sinn Fein’s win is less about growing sentiment towards a united Ireland – talk of which was noticeably missing from Sinn Fein’s electoral campaign where it prioritised positioning itself as the ‘party of unity’ – and is more about Loyalism’s existential crisis and splits within unionism. Sinn Fein only increased its share of the vote by 1% compared to 2017 and there is still a greater unionist vote overall than nationalist vote. The DUP lost seven percentage points of its vote share compared to 2017, getting 21% of the vote to Sinn Fein’s 29%, while the Loyalist Traditional Unionist Voice gained five percentage points, bringing its share of the vote to 7.5%. Alliance, effectively the party of moderate unionists, gained 4.5 percentage points, taking 13.5% of the vote, and doubled its seats.
A growing number of middle class voters, Catholic and Protestant, see themselves as ‘Northern Irish’ rather than ‘British’ or ‘Irish’ and are more concerned about attacks on their living standards and the crisis in health care than in preserving Northern Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom or forcing a border poll for a united Ireland.
According to the CBI, most businesses in the Six Counties want the Protocol to work. It gives them special access to both British and European markets. The Loyalists opposed to the Protocol carry disproportionate weight due to their historic importance in maintaining British rule in Ireland. The Loyalist paramilitary group, the Ulster Volunteer Force, continues to threaten violence if the Protocol is not suspended.
More hot air
On 17 May Truss set out the government’s intention to introduce a Bill to override the Protocol within the coming weeks. Truss said little of substance, essentially repeating Britain’s wish-list of demands presented to Parliament last summer (see FRFI 283). The EU has already rejected these proposals. Any Bill to override the Protocol will take a year to get through the Commons and will likely face opposition and delays in the House of Lords.
Splits remain within the British ruling class over Brexit. Truss is playing to the English nationalist voters on whom she relies for support in her obvious determination to succeed Boris Johnson. She is egged on by the nationalist wing of the ruling class in the European Research Group who promote the illusion that Britain can be an independent imperialist power. A section of business – food monopolies like M&S in particular – faces supply chain issues and has also been lobbying against the Protocol.
MPs including Rishi Sunak and Michael Gove urged caution in picking a fight with the EU and US at a time when Britain looks set to enter another recession. US President Joe Biden has warned Johnson not to rip up the Protocol and the US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi has repeated there will be no trade deal with Britain if it does. A Financial Times editorial encouraged Britain to draw closer to the EU and avoid a trade war that it ‘cannot win’ (FT, 19 May).
Potential for a trade war
If Parliament does pass this Bill, the EU will restart legal action against Britain for its unilateral refusal to implement full border checks since last year. The EU paused this action in July 2021 to encourage negotiations. Beyond that, EU commission officials are working on ‘a package of goods to hit with tariffs’ (FT, 18 May). The EU could target politically sensitive markets, like Scottish salmon exports – Scotland’s largest food export. In 2021 sales of Scottish salmon to the EU were worth £372m and accounted for 61% of global Scottish salmon exports.
The government’s talk of suspending elements of the Protocol has long been used as a distraction tactic and to create leverage in negotiations with the EU. The DUP is relying on Johnson’s government – the same Johnson who told Loyalists there would be an economic border between Britain and the north of Ireland ‘over my dead body’ – to carry through with its threat to override the Protocol. Britain has to choose between backtracking and frustrating the Loyalists further, or continuing to provoke what could result in a trade war with Europe.
Ria Aibhilin
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 288, June/July 2022
