The Windsor EU deal is as good as it gets

Just don’t expect Scotland to get it.

Cards on the table: I think the Windsor’s Framework is the best deal that the UK government could get under the circumstances. Brussels has finally acknowledged that there is an East/West dimension to the Good Friday Agreement, which this is really all  about. 

The Unionists were right to insist that, if no border shall exist on the Irish mainland, no border should exist in the Irish Sea between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. Scottish Nationalists hopes that this model could apply to Scotland, however, are forlorn.

The Windsor deal doesn’t entirely remove that border of course. If the North is to remain in the EU single market it has to broadly follow its rules. Checks on goods landing in the North remain, but the new deal massively reduces the number of them. (Even before Brexit there were some health and safety checks on livestock and foods arriving in Northern Ireland.)

But no longer will every Sainsbury lorry have to contend with 500 pages worth of bureaucratic red tape.  At last the British banger is now liberated. Sausages and other chilled meats will be able to thumb their noses at Brussels as they sail through the Green Lane unimpeded.  Laughing as exports to the Republic are held up in the Red Lane policed by single market commissars.  At least that is how Boris Johnstone might have put it if he supported Rishi Sunak’s Windsor Framework - which he doesn’t appear to

The vexatious issue of sovereignty remains. It always will so long as Britain tries to be simultaneously in the EU single market and out of it. But as always with constitutional issues, it applies in different ways north and south of that UK border at Carlisle.