Ben Habib

Over the past few weeks and months, there has been plenty of focus on the Northern Ireland Brexit Protocol, and the impact it is having on the province. Less attention has been paid, however, to the equally serious problems in Northern Ireland which still need to be solved. It is an uncomfortable truth, but the problem with Northern Ireland is largely in Westminster. The institutionalised neglect over the past few decades has brought the region to where it is now. How do you know Northern Ireland has been neglected? Easy. Look up the time it takes to travel between just about any town in the province to Belfast by public transport. The results will shock you. It is quicker to get to London from Belfast than it is to Londonderry.

Boris Johnson has delivered a deal that I must admit is miles better than I had anticipated. Mind you, I had feared the worst. But this Brexit deal still does not justify the plaudits it is receiving. Let’s start with the good bits. Great Britain (as opposed to the UK) will, on 1 January, be out of the Single Market, largely free of the European Court of Justice and able to make its own laws. We will be able to trade in goods with the EU free of tariffs and quotas. Yet without wishing to detract from the importance of these achievements, there is very little else that is good in the agreement and which could not otherwise be achieved. The Trade and Cooperation agreement (TCA) does not in any way unpick the pernicious Northern Irish Protocol.

The Red Wall, Blue Collar Conservative, Old Labour, Workington Man – or whatever name you wish to attach to this loose coalition – will be unimpressed by Boris's 'green industrial revolution'. This group of voters, many of whom had never turned to the Tories before, backed Boris Johnson to 'get it done'. Their vote for Brexit was a vote for the economic prosperity that has eluded them for decades. Boris would be wise to remember this. Would Red Wall voters have got behind David Cameron? It's not likely, given that Cameron arguably saw his mission as being to ingratiate himself with disaffected Liberal Democrats and the great and the good on the international stage.

There is an understandable desire among some Brexiteers to accept Boris Johnson’s deal. Everyone is battle weary. But it is precisely at this point that Brexiteers must, at the very least, be wary of what is presented to them – and vote down the deal. Why? First, the Withdrawal Agreement has been altered, but only in one substantive way, with respect to Northern Ireland. The backstop is gone and has been replaced with a protocol which theoretically brings NI into the UK’s new customs area but, in all practical aspects, leaves it within the EU’s customs union. The result is that NI would be subject to swathes of EU laws, including full regulatory alignment and with the ECJ as its supreme court. There would, in effect, be a border down the Irish sea.

I never thought I'd become a politician but Theresa May’s failure to deliver Brexit changed my mind. As a result, I decided to stand as a Brexit party candidate and, in May, I was elected as an MEP for London. For someone with no political experience, the weeks since have been surreal. Yet the strangest moment so far came last week, when my fellow Brexit party members and I travelled to Strasbourg for the inaugural meeting of the European parliament. My experience there has convinced me that Britain is right to leave the EU. Even travelling to Strasbourg seemed slightly strange. After all, what is wrong with the perfectly good parliamentary building in Brussels? This being the EU, there is no straightforward answer to this question.