We cannot back moves that damage Northern Ireland and safeguards of Belfast Agreement

Since he became Prime Minister, we have worked closely with Boris Johnson to help him deliver on his promise to take the UK as a whole out of the EU.

We acknowledge that the Prime Minister and his team have sought to acquaint themselves with our concerns, keeping us informed of how negotiations have been progressing and highlighting the sticking points which arose with the EU negotiators and especially the difficult demands of the Irish. In turn we have sought to be flexible and stretched ourselves so as to give the Prime Minister some latitude to reach a fair deal.

The result of our discussions enabled Mr Johnson to address one of the EU’S central concerns about protecting their single market by having NI aligned with EU rules on the sensitive areas of agriculture and agri-food production. We agreed to have this extended to manufactured goods as well.

The one safeguard which we asked for was that the cross-community assent built into the Belfast Agreement for issues as controversial as this would be applied to entering into and continuing in such an arrangement.

Given how central the Belfast Agreement has been to all sides in the negotiations we believed that this would be non-controversial and would be accepted without debate.

Apart from the Belfast Agreement requirement for this, we believed it was necessary to ensure that if the alignment commitment was damaging Northern Ireland’s access to the Great Britain market we could opt out of the arrangements.

Despite the hysteria which the EU and Irish government worked themselves into, claiming that even an extra camera on the Irish border or an additional form to be signed by exporters would be in breach of the spirit of the Belfast Agreement, they have demanded that this central pillar of cross-community consent be removed from any decisions about continued regulatory alignment.

This constitutes a rewriting of the sacrosanct, internationally binding agreement which itself states can only be changed with the agreement of all the parties in NI. Ironically the Irish government which railed against majority rule in NI has been leading the charge for majority rule to be applied to this one issue only.

The UK Government has agreed with them and this is one reason why we will not support this deal. It destroys one of the pillars of the Belfast Agreement in order to detrimentally separate NI from Great Britain and lock NI into the EU single market rules.

Having stretched ourselves on accepting alignment with EU regulations, the EU demanded that we stay within the EU customs arrangements.

On paper we are within the UK customs territory, but in practice EU tariffs will apply to goods entering NI from GB. This will require customs declarations for all goods coming into Northern Ireland, inspections of vehicles at ports of entry, and payments of duty by NI firms. Exemptions will be available if a joint EU-UK committee decide that some goods meet criteria set down in the protocols. This grants the EU a veto over how and to what extent NI business is subject to EU customs requirements.

Furthermore, if a no-tariff free trade agreement cannot be reached with the EU then checks will have to be made on all trade leaving NI for GB in order to avoid EU firms using NI as a backdoor into GB.

The cost of these arrangements will be damaging to a part of the UK which already faces economic disadvantages.

Unlike the Remain cabal in Parliament we do not want to thwart the Prime Minister’s objective of taking us out of the EU. But we will not support a deal which is detrimental to Northern Ireland, which damages our economy and which tears up the Belfast Agreement safeguards upon which the power-sharing arrangements in NI depend.

Sammy Wilson is DUP MP for East Antrim