Editorial: The Supreme Court ruling on the Northern Ireland Protocol has, as its unionist challengers say, highlighted the trade border's impact

As Ben Habib writes opposite (in the print edition, web link below), even those who took the Northern Ireland Protocol to the Supreme Court knew that it was an uphill battle.

Yesterday that highest court in the land ruled, in essence, that there was no legal problem with the Irish Sea border. There wasn’t even a dissenting judge in a case that had sailed through the Northern Ireland courts, where local judges were similarly unconcerned by any illegality in the protocol.

Contrast that, incidentally, with the Supreme Court ruling on the legal challenge to Boris Johnson’s pro-rogation of Parliament in 2019. The three most senior judges in England and Wales outside of the Supreme Court declined to find what the then prime minister had done was unlawful, and then the 11 judges in the final court all found that it was. Thus, astonishingly, of the 14 top judges in the land, three in one court found one way and 11 in the other found the other! Plenty of observers sensed a political aspect to Supreme Court unanimity then, and many unionists will suspect one now.

For all the clever arguments as to why the court yesterday found the right way, imagine a scenario in which, first, the UK government fundamentally altered parts of the Belfast Agreement and parts of the constitutional outworkings of the UK in a way that Irish nationalists despised, and then the Supreme Court found that none of it needed to be done explicitly and that a minority protection had easily and legitimately been over-written. It is hard to envisage either happen, politically or legally, because everyone involved would know a transatlantic tsunami of rage would follow.

Dismaying though it is to reflect on events, the admirable politicians who took this case to the Supreme Court are right to focus on what it has brought into the open, as to the immense nature of the protocol and the nonsense initial UK denials about its impact.

• Ben Habib and protocol challengers: The Supreme Court ruling has confirmed our worst fears about the Irish Sea border

• Paul Bew: The constitutional status of NI is unchanged but unionist alienation must be addressed