Good morning. Lord Frost, the Brexit minister, is holding talks this morning with his EU counterpart, Maroš Šefčovič, in an attempt to resolve the increasingly acrimonious dispute about the post-Brexit rules in place governing trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. These involve checks on some goods, and potentially some restrictions (including later this year on sausages and other chilled meats) to protect the EU single market, which includes Northern Ireland. The UK agreed to all these rules when it signed the Northern Ireland protocol. But now it is arguing that there is a need for a rethink because: a) the EU is being too “purist” in enforcing these rules; and b) the UK did not fully realise what the protocol would involve.
Frost made this latter argument in an article for the Financial Times (paywall) at the weekend. He wrote:
We expected to be able to operate it in a way which respected the sensitive politics in Northern…