Nonsense stems from Theresa May idea

On September 10 Prime Minister Liz Truss signed the Proclamation of King Charles III, declaring that ‘the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’ had ‘solely and rightfully come to him’ and that he had ‘become our only lawful and rightful Liege Lord’, ‘of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of His other Realms and Territories, King’.

So there should no longer have been any doubt in her mind that Northern Ireland is still an integral part of the United Kingdom; it has not been quietly hived off to become one of the ‘other Realms and Territories’, possibly a kind of buffer zone between the UK and the EU, and maybe even a ‘condominium’, with sovereignty shared between the UK and the EU or the Irish Republic.

Yet in the following week a government lawyer continued to argue in the Belfast

High Court that, for all purposes connected with the movement of goods, Northern Ireland must be treated as part of the EU, and Great Britain must be treated as a foreign country, and in his words ‘What it means fundamentally is that the United Kingdom cannot be treated as a unitary state’.

All this nonsense stems from Theresa May’s original crazy idea that the best way to control the small volume of goods carried across the open land border into the Irish Republic was not by the obvious answer of export controls on those goods but by EU checks and controls on all the goods brought into the UK, and moreover on all the goods produced in the UK.

Dr D R COOPER Belmont Park Avenue Maidenhead