Northern Ireland Protocol: TUV leader Jim Allister says DUP deal with government retains red and green lanes, Irish Sea Border and EU jurisdiction over Province

Mr Allister was speaking after the Government published the proposed legislation behind its new deal with the DUP to restore Stormont.

The legislation is intended to address unionist concerns that the Northern Ireland Protocol has undermined the Province’s place in the union in commercial, constitutional and regulatory terms.

After studying the new legislation, Mr Allister said: "Our Union is still ruptured - the only difference now being that the DUP is stepping up as Protocol implementers."

Responding to the Government’s explanatory ‘command paper’ for the new legislation, he said the "oversell" in it is illustrated by the fact that it fails to admit that the Supreme Court held the NI Protocol had suspended Article 6 of the Acts of Union.

He also claimed it engaged in "semantic contortions" to contend that NI is not in the EU’s single market for goods, when the imposition of hundreds of laws that control the EU single market, as imposed by Protocol, "are there in plain sight".

He added that "even the ban on duty free confirms we are regarded as EU territory".

"There is no point in HM Government boasting that Parliament is sovereign when it refuses to take back the sovereignty over NI surrendered to the EU. Indeed, it is clear the negotiations with the DUP were within the confines of the Protocol."

The MLA said the DUP had promised to fully restore NI's place in the UK; remove the Irish Sea Border; Remove the jurisdiction of EU law and restore Article 6 of the Acts of Union.

"Having now seen the meagre legal text of Sir Jeffrey’s deal, it is clear none of what was promised has been achieved," he said.

The King’s Counsel contended;-

• NI still operates subject to the same hundreds of EU laws governing NI’s goods economy, which Stormont ministers can’t change, he said.

• The tool to allegedly curb expansion of these EU laws is the "wholly inadequate" Stormont Brake; but this, he says, does not allow Stormont to stop anything, but leaves it up to the UK government and eventual arbitration under an EU panel.

• NI remains not just “caught in the web” of the EU’s single market and all its “stultifying” foreign rules, but also under the EU’s Customs Code which requires GB to be treated as a country foreign to the UK in trade terms.

• The Irish Sea border will stay, he says, with all raw materials for NI manufacturing and processing (a very significant part of NI’s economy) having to pass through the rigours of the red lane, where tariffs, checks and paperwork are undiminished.

• The border posts, which are being built at a cost of millions, remain as undeniable evidence that the border stays, he says.

• Even the green lane retains paperwork and "the insult" of having to be in a trusted trader scheme to trade in your own country.

• It follows inexorably that NI will continue to be a political territory “ruled in part by UK laws and in part by foreign EU laws, and with a border partitioning the UK and impeding unfettered trade".