The Telegraph, 4 March 2021, Sammy Wilson MP
The Northern Ireland Protocol must go. It is not enough for it simply to be tweaked.
The two main reasons that it was considered necessary – to protect the EU’s internal market and to protect the Good Friday Agreement – are both fallacious.
First, the Northern Ireland Protocol fundamentally breaks the constitutional integrity of the United Kingdom. Part of the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland (NI), has been split off from the rest of the UK. NI is subject to an outside law-making body, the EU, and a non-UK court (ECJ) without any recourse to Westminster or Stormont.
The constitutional position of NI has been changed without the consent of the people of NI – as required by the GFA. The NI Protocol keeps NI under EU Single Market rules in respect of manufacturing and agriculture.
Second, the architect of the Good Friday Agreement, Lord Trimble, has written that the NI Protocol “amounts to a seismic and undemocratic change in the constitutional position of NI and runs contrary to the most fundamental premise in the Good Friday Agreement.”
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