Soon after Boris Johnson struck a deal with the EU in October 2019 on the Withdrawal Agreement, including the Northern Ireland protocol, the British government demanded changes to the Protocol. It had some strong arguments: the Protocol required checks on goods flowing from Great Britain to Northern Ireland, which inconvenienced some businesses and consumers in that region. Furthermore, the application of EU law to Northern Ireland, with the consequent role for the European Court of Justice (ECJ), threatened many Unionists’ sense of British identity. But the EU refused to make changes, arguing that in order to avoid a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, the former had to stay in the EU’s single market for goods, and that required a border in the Irish Sea.
The deadlock over the Protocol continued for three years, until today, with the announcement by Rishi Sunak and Commission President Ursula von der Leyen of the ‘Windsor Framework’. This agreement on how to implement the protocol was made possible by the EU proving more flexible than many commentators, myself included, thought likely.
The Commission accepted that not only goods going from Great Britain to Northern Ireland should pass through a ‘green channel’ with minimal checks, if that was their final destination, but also food and farm produce, too. London,
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