Map: Ulamm, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s being reported that a breakthrough is imminent regarding the Northern Ireland Protocol.

With talk that, by using technology and a reduction in checks, an invisible trade border can be put in place across the Irish Sea.

The thinking is, that this would replace the current onerous set-up and appease the Loyalist community.

So that after fresh, albeit delayed, Stormont elections in January, the Unionists would allow a power sharing executive to be formed.

But there is one simple truth that so many ignore. That being, if any sort of border across the Island of Ireland is a heinous crime, then under the Belfast Agreement any border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland must be as equally heinous.

And further, if an invisible border can be formed down the Irish Sea, then why can that invisible border not be applied between the North and South of Ireland?

It would, after all, only be adding to the already existing currency border, civil law border, tax border and criminal law border. So, another invisible border alongside those would make no difference. In fact, it would make total sense.

But the protocol enforced Irish Sea border has now become a symbol of the ‘defeat’ of the UK as ‘punishment’ for the temerity of the UK leaving the European Union. That sort of Brussels thinking requires the complexity and expense of two borders, not one simple border.

The UK government should not agree to a so-called invisible border being placed anywhere other than where it should be placed - and that is at the actual border between countries.

To accept anything else is providing our ‘friends and partners’, with a permanent confirmation of Northern Ireland’s diminished status within the UK, while also allowing them stored ammunition to use against us during any future disagreements.

Lester Taylor

UK Independence Party – Spokesman for Brexit and Northern Ireland