Gettough, boris

Thank you for Brian Monteith’s article (Perspective, 16 May) giving the facts of NI/GB/ EU life and refuting the onesided views of fellow Scotsman columnists Joyce Mcmillan (Perspective, 13 May) and Christine Jardine (Perspective, 16 May). Are they among those whose default position, in any UK dispute with the EU, is that the UK is wrong?

Neither of them even mentioned the Protocol’s Article 16, whose sole raison-d’etre was agreed by the EU precisely to resolve UK/EU disputes – and was of course invoked by the EU in Ursula von der Leyen’s vaccine tantrum (albeit soon withdrawn)!

It is not a question of “ripping up” the Protocol but of how it is operated in practice. Trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland equates to well below 0.01 per cent of the EU’S GDP, yet Brussels insists on implementing on that miniscule fraction around 20 per cent of all its external-border checks on goods.

Until June 2017, under the then Irish Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, the UK and Ireland cooperated in developing sensible electronic off-border checks and controls; and the EU itself was reported to have published a similar solution. Kenny was then replaced by Leo Varadkar, Theresa May lost her majority and authority in her totally unnecessary general election, and Ireland and the EU decided to weaponise the border issue, resulting in May’s backstop and then Johnson being forced to accept the Irish Sea border, with the Protocol’s Art 16 safeguard, in order to achieve any sort of Brexit whatever.

Lord frost and liz truss have proposed sensible changes to the EU’S demands; if it requires the UK to invoke Article 16 to achieve them, with infinitely greater justification than von der Leyen had, then so be it. JOHN BIRKETT

St Andrews, Fife