@JamieBrysonCPNI
Editor@UnionistVoice.com
The continuous appeasement of the Irish Government, being feted in the language of friends and allies, is the root cause of the current abominable proposals which would deliver a fully-fledged economic United Ireland.
The Irish Government are no friends of the United Kingdom or the British population in Northern Ireland. As correctly identified by unionism in the early 1990s, they are an active part of an increasingly overt pan-nationalist coalition whose core objective is the mutilation of the United Kingdom.
Privately many in the DUP said that they were supporting the Slow Surrender proposal for a time-limited economic United Ireland simply as a tactical move in the no deal blame game. There are two issues with that, the first being that even if we accepted that it was simply a tactical move; then even at that the DUP have ideologically accepted the principle of an economic United Ireland and a border in the Irish Sea.
The second, and most obvious issue, is that any concession is always pocketed by the aggressive nationalist agenda and they then used as a staging post towards their ultimate goal of a United Ireland. The Slow Surrender proposal goes even further than the pernicious Belfast Agreement. It moves far beyond the harmonisation trajectory of the agreement, instead subsuming us into an economic United Ireland, which naturally will lead to an incremental political divergence from the United Kingdom.
The only route to deliver a clean Brexit, and strengthen the union, is leaving the European Union with no deal and accepting the reality that if the United Kingdom are to leave the EU as one sovereign entity then there must be a customs border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. That, of course, would shatter the Belfast Agreement contrived process of all-Ireland harmonisation, and why would any unionist object to that?
The pandering and appeasement to Dublin will not only be making many grassroots unionists and loyalists uneasy, but absolutely furious. As a range of loyalist voices have repeatedly warned in recent weeks, the loyalist community are not being factored into the calculations around a Brexit deal.
Republicans have been rewarded yet again for threatening peace with constant stream of Brexit concessions. Loyalists have consistently sought to reaffirm a strong commitment to peace, yet what has that achieved?
There appears to be a state-sponsored narrative that loyalism will tolerate the type of concessions being proposed. I do not think that is the case. The one unifying objective within loyalism is to ensure that the union remains safe. Indeed the announcement of the Combined Loyalist Military Command in 1994 was predicated upon that very basis. It therefore stands to reason that the one test for loyalism will be this; does any Brexit deal weaken the union?
In simple terms- it’s the constitutional position, stupid!
The current proposals, for an economic United Ireland, not only weakens the union but mutilates it and shoehorns Northern Ireland to an all-Ireland system, annexed off from the rest of the United Kingdom.
The union would no longer remain safe.