Northern Ireland Brexit deal: UK government denies that its Protocol Bill was always a bluff after stinging attack from Lord Frost

​Lord Frost made the accusation in a stinging analysis piece for the Daily Telegraph yesterday.

He had served variously as the government’s chief negotiator of Task Force Europe in 2020/21, was the prime minister's Europe advisor 2019/21, and was the chief Brexit negotiator in 2019/20.

Speaking of the newly forged Windsor Framework, announced by PM Rishi Sunak on Monday, he wrote: “What this deal does not seem to do is change the fundamentals.

“To restate them: the protocol currently applies EU laws on customs, the goods single market, VAT and state aid in Northern Ireland ...

“It is not obvious that this new deal changes this basic structure, only how it is applied. It is slightly amended but remains in place, and EU law remains supreme in Northern Ireland.”

The Protocol Bill was meant to grant the government power to unilaterally halt the operation of the protocol.

Speaking of the bill, which the government launched and then allowed to drift into abeyance, he said the current deal is the result of that lack of resolve.

The Windsor Framework is “the best we could persuade the EU to do, because we weren’t prepared to use the Protocol Bill and the EU knew it”.

The government said: “We introduced the bill and took it through the House of Commons, which demonstrated our seriousness to fixing the problems with the old Northern Ireland Protocol in absence of an agreement with the EU.

“As the PM and his predecessors have said, our preference was always a negotiated outcome – the Windsor Framework provides certainty and stability and will benefit the people of Northern Ireland far quicker than the Bill.

“The Bill did not change anything in international law and kept the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice.

"The Windsor Framework makes binding legal changes to the treaty itself and is explicitly based on international law, and the original legal justification for the Bill has now fallen away.”

As to Lord Frost’s claims that many of the protocol's current affronts to sovereignty remain intact, the government said: “We don’t recognise this.

"The Windsor Framework is a new legal and constitutional framework, fundamentally changing and rewriting the core text of the original treaty.”

“We have published a number of legal texts that provide the legally binding basis for the arrangements we’ve secured.

“We have critically addressed the democratic deficit and provided a clear democratic safeguard through the Stormont Brake.

"This means, through concerns raised by elected representatives in NI, the UK can veto rules that would impact everyday lives.

“This goes further than the July 2021 Command Paper and the Bill, ends the ratchet of the automatic presumption of dynamic alignment, and puts the arrangements in NI under a new framework of democratic control.”

TUV leader Jim Allister said: “Lord Frost makes many very telling points … including his observation that the Protocol Bill was always a bluff and the EU knew as much. He is correct to sum up the situation as ‘the protocol simply renamed the Windsor Framework’.”