People Before Profit is dismayed at the recent actions of the Tories and the DUP who have been ramping up rhetoric in relation to the Northern Ireland Protocol, with recent threats to trigger Article 16. Once again, the Tories are pandering to right-wing Brexiter Unionists, even though the majority of people in the North voted to remain in the EU.
The Tories are trying to serve their own narrow imperial self-interests and to maintain a rhetoric that diverts the minds of people from the sleaze and corruption surrounding their party.
But in doing, so they are running roughshod over the wishes of ordinary people in the North of Ireland and using working class people as pawns in their game.
People Before Profit stands firmly against these dangerous games which could lead to the intensification of the border between the North and South of Ireland.
The ramping up of rhetoric from the DUP against the protocol, as well as recent loyalist attacks on bus drivers and other workers, can only be seen as dangerous attempts to further sectarianise politics, precisely at the time when we need to build working class unity across the divide.
Recent polls conducted by Queens’ University indicate that the majority of people here do not oppose the protocol.
If loyalists were particularly vexed about the protocol, they should take their protest to the top of society, to the leaders of the DUP and the Tories, whose right-wing vision for Brexit brought about the protocol in the first place, as opposed to dangerously targeting frontline workers going about their jobs. People Before Profit offers its support and solidarity to workers who were targeted in these disgraceful attacks.
In Mid and East Antrim, we have seen faux threats of loyalist violence used as a justification to shut Larne Port, with the support of DUP Ministers, and these instances have now been mired in accusations of management bullying of workers in Mid and East Antrim Council.
The evidence points to a Unionism in crisis and relying on stoked sectarian tensions, in a context where the DUP has been consistently declining in the polls. We stand in solidarity with workers in trade unions who have opposed this division.
Since the onset of this crisis working class people have been used as pawns in a conflict between two reactionary blocks; British capitalism led by the Tories on the one hand, and an EU super-state that is steeped in neo-liberalism and complicit in the drowning of refugees, on the other.
People Before Profit believe we urgently need to make a break away from the failures of free market capitalism as represented by elites in London, Dublin and Brussels, and fight for a 32-county socialist Ireland based on the power and interests of working class people.
