I Remember The Omagh Bloodshed – Boris Johnson’s No-Deal Brexit Risks A Return To Violence

At Best For Britain, we have been clear that a disastrous no-deal Brexit would cast that agreement in the bin, demonstrating utter contempt for the devastating effect Brexit could have on Northern Ireland – indeed, on both sides of the Irish border.

Johnson claims he wants to keep the Good Friday Agreement safe, yet his desire to push through a no-deal Brexit makes that impossible. What he fails to understand is that Brexit for Ireland means a potential return to more regular sectarian conflict. 

The course the prime minister’s steering is dangerously undemocratic and divisive, one that threatens to destabilise the United Kingdom.

Risking Northern Ireland’s hard-won peace, in order to pursue his own Conservative career ambitions, is unforgivable. Solutions years down the line won’t cut it: we have a deadline of 31 October this year.

If there was ever a reason to stop Brexit – and there are many – it is this: it is wrong, wrong, wrong to put lives at risk in an ill-advised cliff-edge exit from the EU.

It is morally indefensible and, in practical terms, risks locking Britain into a new cycle of uncertainty and bloodshed.

And let us not forget the impact on UK business of anything that damages the GFA. Donald Trump and John Bolton may be talking up a trade deal, but the truth is that a trade deal is not in their gift.

Congress, from Nancy Pelosi down, has made it abundantly clear that it will block any deal that puts the GFA and peace at risk.

So a no-deal Brexit runs the risk of a return to violence and blocking trade negotiations with the US before they’ve even properly begun. Genius.

When it comes to Brexit, we cannot be naïve in thinking the so-called Special Relationship will help us.

Look to history: Ronald Reagan’s opposition to the Falklands War in 1982; our continued trade agreements with Fidel Castro following the Cuban Missile Crisis and subsequent embargoes imposed by the Kennedy regime 20 years earlier.

In 1956, Eden and the Tories awoke one day after Suez to discover they were in isolation, shunned, betrayed even, by their closest ally and no longer able to command a seat at the table of the world’s superpowers.

Brexit is, as Best For Britain has warned repeatedly, bad news for the UK both locally and globally. Britain would pay a high price for crashing out of the EU – and if you want to know just how high a price, ask those who remember those terrible events in Omagh just 21 years ago.

Naomi Smith is CEO for Best For Britain