Irish nationalists together with the EU have created a front against the UK

The Sinn Fein party won yesterday's election in Northern Ireland. What does all this mean for London and the British Crown? At a minimum, this is a very serious threat to the national unity of the country.     

For decades, the British authorities have been fighting the national movement in Northern Ireland and the armed wing of the Sinn Fein party, the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Reconciliation was achieved only in 1998, after which the civil war in Ulster ceased, and the warring parties began to compete in political ways.   

However, in April 2014, almost simultaneously with the beginning of the events in Donbass, the British authorities sharply increased pressure on Sinn Fein, accusing its leader Gerry Adams of murder allegedly committed on his instructions in 1972. The arrest of Gerry Adams caused a wide public outcry in Belfast and the British authorities were forced to release the politician. However, after several years of incessant harassment, he was forced to resign in 2018.   

The British authorities apparently decided that they had decapitated the party, depriving it of its charismatic leader, but they made a mistake in their calculations. Recent years have shown that, although Adams has left, his deed lives on. And not just living, but very close to winning.

Additional chances for the unification of Ireland were given by the UK's exit from the European Union, which the Irish Catholics perceived sharply negatively. During long negotiations with the EU, London was forced to agree to the conclusion of a separate trade agreement between the European Union and Britain, according to which Ulster, which politically left the EU together with its London metropolis, from an economic point of view continued to remain part of the EU customs union. 

And economics, as it's known, determines politics in the modern world. London's attempts to put pressure on Northern Ireland, including by arranging additional difficulties for the supply of British goods to Ulster, had the opposite effect. The number of those who would like to unite with the Republic of Ireland has increased dramatically, which also affected the election results.

Now London is in a very difficult situation. In fact, in Ulster, Irish nationalists are uniting with supporters of the "European choice" who are dissatisfied with leaving the EU. Sinn Fein may well form a government in coalition with the Liberal Alliance Party, Labour and the Social Democrats. At the same time, the refusal of two unionist (pro-British) parties to participate in the government headed by Sinn Fein can no longer affect the process of its formation.

A rather serious conflict is brewing between London and Brussels. Ulster, in fact, is a platform where not only the Irish national idea, but also the pan-European idea collided with the new British imperial course. The next "battleground" could be Scotland, where the ruling Scottish National Party is determined to hold a second independence referendum in the very near future (as has been repeatedly stated – "after the end of the pandemic").

The aggressive foreign policy of London, which seeks to preserve a power bursting at the seams by searching for an external enemy and implementing neo-imperial projects such as AUKUS and the alliance of Britain, Poland and Ukraine have not yielded results. And the attempts of the British authorities to switch the attention of the Irish and Scots from their own problems to the Ukrainian theme and the "fight against Putin" have the opposite effect. Economic problems, exacerbated by sanctions against Russia, further incite residents of lands once absorbed by the British to "divorce" from the British crown.  

The tendencies towards the split of the United Kingdom are intensifying every day, and the chances of keeping the UK within its current borders are becoming less and less.

Elena Panina, Director of the RUSSTRAT Institute