"The [Northern Ireland] protocol isn't a just law. It was imposed on the UK by Brussels at the moment of our greatest weakness," Allister tells us, and likens it to treaties forced on the Qing dynasty. By, er, Britain, mainly.
Read on for the full text of Allister's magnificent nonsense.
Why don't the European elites ever learn lessons from history? It should be obvious that the Northern Ireland Protocol, signed under duress by the UK, cannot last in its present state. The only questions are what replaces it, how quickly and whether it is enough to restore the province's fragile balance and save the Good Friday Agreement. The idea that the EU will be able to keep the protocol alive by threatening Britain with a trade war merely confirms the scale of Brussels's delusion.
The protocol is a classic case of an "unequal treaty", of the kind that China's Qing dynasty was forced to sign with all of the imperial powers. The result was bitterness at a "century of humiliation" that continues to poison international relations to this day, and a sense of resentment which helped to usher in China's deplorable communist-nationalist regime.
The consequences won't be as bad or long-lasting in the case of the protocol, but they could still end up being extremely unpleasant. Tensions are rising in Northern Ireland, and there is now a real chance that relations between Britain and the EU could break down completely.
Brussels is asking for too much when it threatens sausage wars: no self-respecting sovereign state can accept this, nor, after years of listening to such nonsense, still believe the ridiculous excuse that "unsafe" British chilled meat products might "leak" into the supposedly sacrosanct European single market. So what if they do? Our sanitary regulations remain the same – and even if and when we choose to change them, it still wouldn't matter, or could be dealt with in other, more sensible ways. It is time to call the EU's bluff: its obsession with phytosanitary rules is merely an excuse to seek to detach Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK.
The EU should have enough self-awareness to understand that the deal it obtained was too good to be true, and that the only way the protocol can survive is if it chooses to exercise maximum flexibility. The UK had no real choice but to sign it: it could either agree to a treaty that essentially handed away parts of Britain's sovereignty over Northern Ireland, or accept a no-deal Brexit that would have created unnecessary economic damage while still not resolving the Irish situation. The EU wasn't acting rationally: it was set on kamikaze mode, committed to punishing Britain at any cost.
Lord Frost and his team, who took over the negotiations when Boris Johnson became Prime Minister, wouldn't have started from there, but calculated correctly that signing up to the protocol was their least bad option. It is nonsense to claim that they hadn't read the documents properly or had misunderstood them: they knew that the protocol would only ever be acceptable if the EU tried hard to make it work. Frost had to hope for the best, though in the end he got the worst. Brexit is a process, not a single event.
Far more so than ordinary treaties, the protocol is full of get-out clauses, not least Article 16, which allows unilateral action if the agreement creates "serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties that are liable to persist, or to diversion of trade". It also contains a democratic lock, with the first consent vote due in 2024. Both sides knew all along that the protocol may not work.
Contrary to what Remainers claim, there was another way. The EU and Britain's political elite could have accepted Brexit, and negotiated a sensible settlement, including one that dealt with the real issues relating to Northern Ireland, in a grown-up, technologically savvy fashion. It would have required concessions from the UK, but not as many; and it would have necessitated a very different, commonsensical fudge from the EU of a kind it has often displayed when it comes to the euro, budgetary rules or involving other states.
Instead, Britain under Theresa May displayed staggering weakness at a critical time, and the EU's negotiators, stunned at our moral implosion, realised they could get away with a power-grab if they stuck to their legalistic hard line. May's negotiating team saw themselves as supplicants and boxed her successor into a corner. The Remainer rearguard action when Johnson became PM, and the accompanying constitutional crisis, emboldened the EU so much that it started to believe its own propaganda.
One can be too clever: it is possible to force a party suffering from a momentary weakness to sign a contract so one-sided that it is eventually deemed unenforceable. Legislation, such as the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977, reinforces this point. Those who say that Britain, having signed the protocol, must now stick with it are therefore wrong. We are within our rights to seek to renegotiate it entirely, and we are entitled to invoke Article 16. Unjust law isn't real law; and to repudiate this illegitimate nightmare to salvage peace in Northern Ireland would not damage our reputation for being a law-following society.
The EU's appalling behaviour, and its attempts to drag in President Biden, remind us that there are two kinds of political entities. Those of the more mature, democratic variety can coexist with neighbouring states, working with them to resolve local, geographically relevant issues. Then there are the status-obsessed imperialistic bullies, who seek to control and direct their "near abroad", Russia-style, and who are obsessed with their "sphere of influence" and showing the rest of the world that they are a "regional superpower."
The EU, pathetically for an entity that is waning economically, culturally, demographically and militarily, belongs to the latter category. Its weapon of choice, typically, is its bureaucracy: it wants to force others to follow its rules. It can only be "friends" with those it controls in this way.
An organisation supposedly set up to ensure peace in Europe is now busy undermining harmony in Northern Ireland and free trade more widely, and all because it refuses to accept countries' right to self-determination. The hypocrisy, the cant, the double-standards would beggar belief had we not all grown used to them over the years. Frost and Boris Johnson must stand firm.
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