Editorial: Jim Allister is right to repudiate Nigel Farage's drivel about Russia being provoked over Ukraine

Morning View

​In a BBC radio interview, Jim Allister yesterday distanced himself from Nigel Farage on some key issues.

​The TUV leader recently suffered the humiliation of Nigel Farage tearing up, in effect, his deal with the TUV.

While Reform UK issued a statement to say that Mr Farage’s endorsement of two DUP MPs was not in fact a repudiation of the agreement with the TUV, it was a despicable thing to do.

And yet it is undeniable that the TUV took risks in getting involved with such a party given the threadbare support that key Brexiteers have shown for NI unionists since 2016.

But it was quite reasonable for Mr Allister to say yesterday that his pact does not extend to issues such as foreign policy.

Nigel Farage’s comment to GB News in 2022 was contemptible drivel: “Yes we know the Russians can be paranoid, but why poke the Russian bear with a stick? If Vladimir Putin's one demand is that we state clearly that Ukraine is not going to join Nato, why don't we do it?”

It was the sort of rubbish that Mr Farage’s pal Donald Trump might come out with, except that he is too inarticulate and shallow to express or develop such thoughts.

The nightmare for foreign policy conservatives in the UK and the US is that America seems to hover between the instinctive naivete of Democratic Party leaders, who send signals of weakness to regimes such as China and Iran and Russia, and the isolationism of Republican Party leaders like Mr Trump, who want to disengage from the world and who think that those countries are none of their business.

American leaders have rarely thought much about this province, and even some British leaders don’t give it much thought, but unionists are most likely to find favour with traditional conservative politicians in those countries who understand UK history and NI’s integral place within it.