“If the Government takes the view that laws can be broken, the rule of law collapses. It breaches the trust of its citizens.”
By overselling what it has achieved, the Government risks setting unrealistic expectations and limiting its future room for manoeuvre.
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.
The Government should work to diversify supply chains to increase resilience by making it easier and less expensive for UK supermarkets to import produce from all over the world.
We don’t have time to waste. During 2025 and 2026 the TCA, the UK/EU fisheries agreement, the EU’s decision on UK data adequacy and its current policy on derivatives trading all come up for review.
It would be unwise to scupper a deal on data which would allow hands-off, targeted enforcement and free local and mainland-facing Ulster businesses from EU control.
As I vote on legislation passing through Parliament, I notice a steady stream of laws that we could not have passed were we still in the EU.
The most likely way through this impasse is a new agreement, sitting on top of the existing Protocol and introducing a new set of principles on how it operates. Such an agreement must preserve Northern Ireland’s constitutional status.
There is next to no support among its ranks in the Commons for more immigration, liberalising planning law and improving access to European markets.
The shift to subsidies is more than the timely, targeted and temporary measures that we saw during the pandemic, and signifies a bigger change in global public policy.
In the geo-political battle of ideas, between an open, liberal vision of government and society, and a more authoritarian template, the continent, overwhelmingly, is in the right column.
It is absurd for the UK to lecture nations with much stronger environmental records whilst using creative accounting to flatter our own CO2 emissions.
From renationalisation of the energy and train companies to a bonfire of environmental and employment regulations, taking back control from Brussels has opened a new range of possibilities that were previously off the menu.
The most likely-looking outcome, at this point, is the same one which has marked the entire process: another deadline from the Government coming and going.
Why has the Government signed off a safeguard which Sinn Féin can disable by collapsing Northern Ireland’s devolved institutions again?