Peter Foster is the Financial Times Public Policy Editor. Sam McBride is Northern Ireland Editor of the Belfast Telegraph and Sunday Independent and Anne Menon is Director at UK in a Changing Europe and Jill Rutter is Senior Fellow at the Institute for Government. So, if I can start off with you, what is the protocol and why has it been of such a problem?

So, the protocol is the deal that Boris Johnson signed, as you said, that ensured there was not a return to a trade border in Northern Ireland. Remember, with Brexit, the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic Ireland becomes an external border of the EU. And in order to avoid that becoming a trade border, Boris Johnson signed a deal that agreed that Northern Ireland would follow EU rules and regulations for goods. But if you're not going to have a border north south, you're going to have to have a border east-west. And so, the deal necessitated essentially a trade border in the Irish Sea between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. And that trade border upset a lot of people, a lot of unionists, particularly in Northern Ireland. It calls frictions for businesses and has actually soured relations between the UK and the EU pretty much since it

came into force on the 1st of January 2020. Jill, briefly, why did the EU insist upon it, given that it was likely to cause problems?

Because one of the EU's big red lines was to protect what they call the integrity of the single market. Any good circulating in Northern Ireland, they assumed could just, because there would be no land border in the Ireland island, reach Ireland inside the EU single market and go from there without any of those checks into the rest of the EU. So, they were saying, in order to protect the integrity of our single market, we need to be sure that goods in Northern Ireland meet our standards.