2025 and the Politics of Faithfulness
Recent years have witnessed the development of a growing literature regarding what is being called ‘the Politics of Belonging’. In 2019, for example, the inaugural publication of the Conservative think tank Onward, argued that politicians must adjust to the demands of this development which it claimed testifies to a shift as great as that associated with the end of the post-war consensus. Reasserting a small ‘c’ conservative focus on community and rootedness, this new political turn sets a boundary not on our capacity to critique the big state, but on our willingness to accept free market, utilitarian solutions to the extent they call into question who we are. The ultimate expression of this dynamic in our own politics (to date) has undoubtedly been Brexit and the imperative to secure self-government in and through our own community, rejecting that from others beyond our community.
To the extent that Brexit has been driven by the Politics of Belonging, UK governance decisions since 2019, and especially since 2023, have been remarkably tone deaf to the needs of the present moment. In order to secure Brexit for Great Britain, the Government asked Parliament to vote to impose on Northern Ireland what had been so unthinkable for the UK as a whole that MPs had rejected it, not just once, but three times – namely subjection to the EU Single Market and its laws. MPs complied and, instead of strengthening our national belonging and togetherness, voted for a greater fracturing of the UK political demos than anything previously conceived by the free market, creating a situation in which, while the people of England, Wales and Scotland can continue to stand for election to make all the laws to which they are subject, those of us in Northern Ireland can no longer do so. This is not because our laws are now imposed on us by the rest of our country and without our input, but because, in a staggering 300 areas, our laws are now made for us by a foreign Parliament in which we have no representation whatsoever. Such was its commitment to strengthening the UK demos that Parliament voted to subject part of our country to the humiliation of being offered up to the EU as what is effectively a colony and for its division from the rest of the country by the imposition of an international Sanitary-Phyto-Sanitary (SPS) border and a customs border (both of which the EU govern), cutting the United Kingdom into two.
Our new Government demonstrated that it is even more out of touch when, on 6 th December, it put up an MP to reject Jim Allister MP’s Private Members Bill, (the EU (Withdrawal Arrangements) Bill, which serves the historic purpose of restoring the foundation of the UK political demos/politics of belonging, by replacing the Irish Sea border with a means of managing the UK-EU land border without border infrastructure - Mutual Enforcement) on the basis of their apparent commitment to faithfulness.
Peter Dowd, the MP for Bootle, told Parliament: ‘This issue [that of the Bill] really goes to the heart of the question of trust, belief or faith in what we say as a nation. I look to our finest playwright to set the scene—in fact, I go to scene four from Shakespeare’s Henry VI, part 3: “For trust not him that hath once broken faith”.
The point was that the Government could not support the Bill because doing so would involve their withdrawing from the Windsor Framework, their solemn agreement with the EU to (among other things) partly disenfranchise Northern Ireland.
In the Government’s fervour for internationalism, it seems they have forgotten that obligations of faithfulness, as David Goodhart observes in his seminal interrogation of the ‘politics of belonging’, The Road to Somewhere, are properly greater to our own. They also overlooked the critical point that the Shakespeare quote pertains to the perils arising from the breaking of faith within a nation, not an orderly withdrawal from an international agreement with good warning.
The truth is that if we want to be good internationalists in 2025, we must return to that basic standard of morality wherein our objective needs to be to ‘love our neighbours as ourselves’, which conveys the priority of the local in the scale of belonging, in that it only ‘works’ if we first love ourselves.
In this context, the solution to the presenting dilemma, the Allister Mutual Enforcement Bill, isn’t going to go away.
Dr Dan Boucher is a former member of the Conservative Party and Conservative Parliamentary candidate in Wales. He left the Party over the Protocol and moved to Northern Ireland where he now works as Senior Researcher to Jim Allister, the MP for North Antrim and Leader of the TUV.
