Keir Starmer is to challenge Rishi Sunak to stand up to the “Brexit purity cult” of Eurosceptics within the Conservative party to resolve the Northern Ireland protocol impasse.
The Labour leader will use a speech in Belfast on Friday to encourage the prime minister to take on the once highly influential European Research Group (ERG) of backbench Tory MPs to find a fix for issues arising from Northern Ireland’s post-Brexit trading arrangements.
Starmer will say he will offer “political cover” at Westminster if Sunak can deliver an agreement with the EU that is in the national interest.
“The time for action on the protocol is now. The time to stand up to the ERG is now,” Starmer will say on Friday. “The time to put Northern Ireland above a Brexit purity cult, which can never be satisfied, is now.”
There is a “small window of opportunity” to resolve the issue before the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday agreement in April, Starmer will say in the speech at Queen’s University.
“We’ve got to use the anniversary to fix minds, get the country and its political process moving forward again – deliver for the people of Northern Ireland,” he will say.
Any deal seen as conceding too much to Brussels could trigger a revolt on the Tory benches, but Starmer will say he will offer Labour support to Sunak.
“Whatever political cover you need, whatever mechanism in Westminster you require, if it delivers for our national interest and the people of Northern Ireland, we will support you,” he will say
The Labour leader will call on the prime minister to recognise the mistakes made by some Tory ministers who had viewed the Irish government as “adversaries” on Brexit.
“That has damaged the political process here in Northern Ireland – no question. And it’s certainly not the spirit of 1998.”
The Northern Ireland protocol was agreed by the then-prime minister Boris Johnson to avoid a hard border with Ireland, but the DUP is refusing to engage with the powersharing institutions until it is dramatically altered or removed.
Unionists oppose the trade barriers it has created between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.
Starmer’s speech comes after the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, criticised the government’s “denial and avoidance” of the “immense damage” Brexit was doing to the country.
In a speech at the London Mansion House government dinner on Thursday, Khan argued for a shift away from the “unnecessarily hardline version” of Brexit towards greater alignment with Europe.
The mayor said: “I simply can’t keep quiet about the immense damage Brexit is doing. Ministers seem to have developed selective amnesia when it comes to one of the root causes of our problems.
“Brexit can’t be airbrushed out of history or the consequences wished away.”
