Also: Scottish Government’s legal regulation reforms denounced by judges and lawyers; Ross offers to work with Nationalist rebels to break Greens’ grip on government; new scandal for PSNI as High Court finds it illegally disciplined officers.
The Windsor Framework is not workable. Its flaws and unworkability are already apparent and will quickly become more so.
Also: DUP and Heaton-Harris in staring match over extra funding as Rishi Sunak rules out coalition with the Unionists at Westminster.
The Belfast Agreement decoupled Northern Ireland’s constitutional future from day-to-day elected politics, but the pro-UK parties failed to adapt.
Recent polling shows the party well ahead of both the UUP and the TUV, meaning the current deadlock would simply be reproduced.
Hopes for normal, non-sectarian and growth-focused politics have been dashed as rent-seeking hard-liners dominate at Stormont.
ConservativeHome’s deputy editor speaks to Michael Portillo about whether or not the events of the past week have made the Union stronger.
The vote on Sunak’s deal confirmed a trend of increasing separation that has been apparent since the word ‘Backstop’ first raised its ugly head.
It will give cover to Conservative opponents of the deal. But the crucial question is the future of Stormont, and on that the Unionists are silent.
The Northern Ireland Protocol has been a stone in the shoe of our relations with Brussels and Washington. The Prime Minister deserves great credit for making progress.
Of the party’s eight Members of Parliament, four struck a sceptical or hostile note whilst the others took a more reserved or conciliatory view.
The current outrage can be written off as displacement activity by those shocked by a deal from Sunak that forces them to consider a compromise.
Nearly seven years after the campaign, we are finally moving towards the kind of deal we might have had all along had we never joined.
It’s possible that he has pulled off a political coup, begun radically to re-set the UK’s relationship with the EU – and created the circumstances in which voters may give him a second look.
The Windsor Framework renders us worse off in terms of the Irish Sea border and creates greater checks and barriers to trade with the rest of the UK compared to what we have experienced thus far with grace periods and easements.