Businesses should be endorsing the UK Internal Market Bill to protect our most important trade, east-west

Aodhan Connolly of the Northern Ireland Retail Consortium, which represents outlets including Sainsbury’s and Asda, told the Stormtont economy committee: “This has been blown out of proportion.”

He also said: “We want to concentrate on the facts, remove the politics and look at the process. The EU have said that they would not, and have not, contemplated this.”

However, the facts in this matter have not been established. And it is an inherently political matter that is being responded to by the UK in a wholly proportionate fashion.

The prime minister of the United Kingdom has said that the UK was being told that if they did not agree to EU terms on the NI Protocol, then it will “not only impose tariffs on goods moving from Great Britain to NI, but that they might actually stop the transport of food products from GB to NI”.

This is a shocking allegation from the head of government. It must be treated with the utmost gravity, and we trust that supermarkets are alarmed that such EU blackmail might be possible even if it is not in fact being utilised.

Boris Johnson’s UK Internal Market Bill (IMB) is an essential corrective to any interpretation of the NI Protocol so extreme that it will clash with existing obligations under treaties, such as the obligation of all parties to the 1998 Belfast Agreement to recognise UK sovereignty in NI.

Businesses almost with one voice endorsed the 2017 backstop, and other iterations of it, which sought above all to prevent any barrier on the less important north-south trade. Now, to ensure no such border, there will be a border in the Irish Sea.

The government must stand firm on its legislation and indeed begin to defend the UK in multiple other spheres.

In the meantime, it would be good to hear some business backing for the admirable motivation behind the IMB.

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