OPINION
Jim Allister is a fierce opponent of the 'Irish sea border' (Image: Getty)
Brexit’s unfinished business is a threat to the unity of the United Kingdom that we ignore at our peril. Everyone in the UK should care about a stitch-up with the European Union which treats one part of the UK like a foreign country.
I have tabled a motion to annul of the Official Controls (Plant Health) and Phytosanitary Conditions (Amendment) Regulations 2025, just as, on January 14, I forced a vote against the Official Control Amendment Regulations.
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Both pieces of legislation help construct the Irish Sea Border, effectively treating Northern Ireland as a foreign country in relation to Great Britain when it comes to biosecurity.
I was particularly relieved that I acted in January because the following day the UK Government announced the steps it was taking to protect our biosecurity after the foot and mouth outbreak in Germany.
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The minister said: “The Government have taken decisive and immediate action. The import of cattle, pigs and sheep from Germany has been stopped to protect farmers and their livelihoods. We will not hesitate to add additional countries to the list if the disease spreads.”
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However, he went on to concede that he was only talking about Great Britain: “In Northern Ireland, the controls will apply to meat and live animals moving from a 3km protection zone and a 10km surveillance zone surrounding the affected premises in Germany. Those products cannot be moved to Northern Ireland.”
One of the most basic functions of the state is the provision of security for its citizens and one of the most basic guarantees of the dignity of citizenship is that the said security is provided equally to all citizens regardless of geography or any other distinction. Nation states only work because they involve a form of government upheld in the name of a national (political rather than ethnic) community in which people are prepared to pay taxes, obey the law and make the ultimate sacrifice in times of war, because of the undergirding sense not only that “we are all in this together” but that “we are all equally in this together”.
In this context, there were two problems with the Government’s announcement. In the first instance, it involved settling for the people of Northern Ireland being afforded a completely different and much weaker level of biosecurity than that of the rest of the UK. In the second instance, it implied that this was what was required by EU biosecurity and that the EU was, therefore, now responsible for Northern Ireland’s biosecurity and that Northern Ireland was no longer part of the same biosecurity identity as the UK.
At this point the champions of the Irish Sea border will make the point that Northern Ireland has long been regarded as part of the same epidemiological unit as the Republic of Ireland. That is correct and before Brexit it resulted in some controls on live animal movements from NI and GB and vice versa. Crucially, however, it did not involve the imposition of an international Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) border of the kind you cross in moving from one country to another, nor the imposition of a different legal regime, let alone one made by a Parliament to which we elect no one, nor did it place us in a different biosecurity identity for government purposes.
The Lords debate on the regulations on January 29 was particularly important because it came after the Foot and Mouth announcement, providing Baroness Hoey and Lord Dodds the opportunity to press these points home. I was quite expecting that the minister might attempt a half-hearted defence of Northern Ireland’s continued location in the UK biosecurity community. What she actually said, though, was: “Northern Ireland continues to be protected under the biosecurity regime of the EU, in line with the Windsor Framework. Under this regime, Northern Ireland implements official controls and additional protections in response to risks, such as measures related to pest-free areas, traceability and additional notification requirements for the highest-risk goods to maintain the biosecurity of the island of Ireland.”
In a statement that demonstrates who is now really responsible for our biosecurity she said: “I want to stress that the EU takes its biosecurity responsibilities for something like foot and mouth extremely seriously. There had not been a foot and mouth outbreak in Germany since 1988, so this is very significant for them.”
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Thus, UK citizens in Northern Ireland not only find themselves discriminated against in the sense that unlike in the rest of the UK, we can no longer stand for election to make the laws to which we are subject not simply in relation to 300 laws but a staggering 300 areas of law. We are also discriminated against in terms of biosecurity in relation which, as an example, while citizens in England, Wales and Scotland can depend on the protection of the UK state banning the import of cattle, pigs and sheep from Germany, in Northern Ireland we are only afforded the much more limited protection arising from a ban on their movement from within a 10 kilometre zone of an affected premises.
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Implicit in this change is an even more disturbing development in the deconstruction of the United Kingdom. The greatest biosecurity threat to a biosecurity community comes from the territory closest to it that resides in a different biosecurity community. Northern Ireland has effectively been reconfigured by a series of regulations from being part of the UK biosecurity community into a different biosecurity community and one that then constitutes, in an important sense, a threat to GB biosecurity.
The old UK biosecurity “we”, upon which we have long depended, has been transformed into a biosecurity “them and us” of Great Britain, on the one hand, and Northern Ireland (appropriated by the Republic and the EU) on the other. No self-respecting country with a future can allow itself to be manipulated by other states into the humiliation of dividing against itself in this way.