How can the EU claim to be safeguarding the Good Friday Agreement while overthrowing its essential requirements under the terms of Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal?
Under Boris’s deal, Northern Ireland must stay in the EU’s single market and customs union for at least four years; after that it can only escape by a simple majority vote in Stormont.
By insisting on this type of vote, the EU is undermining the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, which requires both the unionists and nationalists separately to vote positively for any proposal. In a simple majority vote, the Unionists could easily be outnumbered.
Besides which, by the end of the four-year period, a ‘Canada plus’ free trade deal between the whole of the UK and the EU could have replaced the need for any special temporary Northern Ireland arrangements.
Without such a free trade deal, it will look as if the EU has broken up the UK by ‘annexing’ Northern Ireland, the most Bible believing part of the UK.
Roland Parsons
Painswick, Gloucestershire