A striking feature of the Brexit debate is the lack of a core belief in the EU from the Remain campaign. Most advocates of Remain have their own misgivings about the EU, and, knowing that such concerns are widespread in the UK, their arguments for remaining are becoming steadily more extreme and fanciful. One example of this is the claim that Northern Ireland will particularly suffer from Brexit.

The Government’s barrel-scraping approach to making the Remain case was in evidence in Tuesday’s Daily Telegraph article when William Hague made strong claims about the dangers to Northern Ireland, Gibraltar and the Falklands. I like William: we came into Parliament by by-election in the same year, 1989. But as a daughter of Ulster I profoundly disagree with his arguments on Northern Ireland.

Like Peter Mandelson before him, the former Foreign Secretary plays up the EU’s role in the Good Friday Agreement – although, being a historian, he baulks at rewriting history in the Mandelsonian manner. William Hague writes:

The Good Friday Agreement was based on the assumption that the two countries would be in the EU together, and the various cross-border institutions it established are built on that.

This is true in the sense that Common EU membership was a fact at the time, but it stretches history to argue that the EU was an important facilitator of the agreement as the USA was. While the cross-border institutions were wrapped in an EU structure, this was a convenience and in no way fundamental. These institutions would of course survive Brexit.