Letter: The bid to hoodwink people over the Windsor Framework by involving the king is beneath contempt, particularly when it is just a slightly adjusted version of the Northern Ireland Protocol

Boris Johnson told us "there will be no border in the Irish Sea". Brandon Lewis told us "there is no border in the Irish Sea". Rishi Sunak told us " this new deal removes any sense of a border in the Irish Sea". Chris Heaton-Harris tells us that the administration required to bring goods across the Irish Sea (our main trade route) will "trend towards pre-Brexit levels". Alliance, Sinn Fein, SDLP and various trade bodies told us the initial version of the protocol was as good as it gets, they now tell us the latest version is even better.

All these assurances bring to mind the Ralph Waldron Emerson quote 'The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons'. The attempt by the government to hoodwink people by involving the king and calling the slightly adjusted protocol the Windsor Framework is beneath contempt. The new slightly adjusted version of the protocol will still increase bureaucracy and costs for everyone in Northern Ireland. My reading of the latest protocol is that the EU can use any infringements (and there is always infringements) to ratchet up the bureaucracy over time. A sense of what the resulting ‘all island economy’ will feel like could be gained by trying to do your weekly shop in Dublin with your Belfast wage packet!

James Martin, Dromore, Co Down