Northern Ireland Protocol: Sammy Wilson seeks to remind govt that ‘many unionists died to stay part of UK’

The DUP East Antrim MP was speaking in the House of Commons, where he told the Northern Ireland Secretary that the writ of EU law in the Province remains “the central question that needs to be addressed”.

However, “what we have seen so far appears to be tinkering” with the Protocol, rather than more fundamental reform.

It has been mooted that a pending deal with the UK could smooth the flow of goods from GB to NI using so-called green lanes at ports.

But in recent weeks DUP members have been keen to stress that such a solution would leave untouched a raft of EU laws which apply to Northern Ireland, because the Protocol means it remains a de facto member of the European single market.

That being so, the European Court of Justice would be the final arbiter in trade disputes – something which unionists balk at.

Mr Wilson said that “we have not turned the deal down because we haven’t seen it in its entirety – we’ve simply given the guidelines of what we expect to see in it", and that “until we actually see it in writing we’re certainly not going to take the word of the people who brief us”.

He told MPs there are 300 different areas to which EU laws still apply in NI, and that “if this question is not addressed, then there cannot be, and there will not be, a positive response from this party”.

Mr Wilson added: “Some people have presented this as some kind of a trade problem: if you could have trade flowing freely, the issue would go away.

"It's much more fundamental than that. The trade issue only occurs because there's a different law applies, and there's a different law making body in NI than what there is in the rest of the UK.

"We're not subject to British law anymore... we're subject to laws which are made in Brussels.

"If we tried not to implement them, and tried to ignore them, we've a foreign court which will drag us into the dock to make sure we do.”

Mr Wilson also spoke of the “suppressed anger in the unionist community, by being pushed out of the country which many of them died during a terrorist campaign to be part of”.

He warned him: “That anger and that determination has not changed.”

Meanwhile Carla Lockhart rose to tell MPs that “unionist consent for power-sharing does not currently exist”.

She said the mandate to resist power-sharing was given to the DUP last May by its voters, and “we will not betray that trust – there will be no fudge”.

• Northern Ireland Protocol: Rishi Sunak offers assurance to DUP that 'democratic deficit' is core part of talks