Statement by TUV Leader Jim Allister:-
“With the Irish Sea Border and its Border Control Posts, involving both a regulatory and Customs border, ensconced and increasingly operational from 1st October (Sunday), the most important and telling lessons and effects are the legal and constitutional effects.
“This partitioning border, treating GB as a foreign territory and NI as EU territory, exists because Northern Ireland has been left under the EU’s Customs Code, designed to create a hard external EU border.
“By reason of the fact it is established not by British but by EU law means its operation falls under the oversight not of the U.K. judicial system but the European Court of Justice (ECJ) – vividly illustrating how Union-dismantling it is.
“This past week we had a timely reminder of the pernicious and punitive control of the ECJ when the U.K. was fined £28m for its failure to enforce EU rules on diesel on pleasure craft in Northern Ireland.
“It is part of the folly of Sunak and Co that they have put the U.K. at the mercy of the ECJ not just in respect of the Irish Sea Border but in regard to the vast swathes of EU law still applying to NI under the Protocol/Windsor Framework.
“The EU, through the ECJ, has the U.K. over a barrel whereby any infringement of any EU law in NI, including in respect of border checks, can, and will, result in huge EU fines. What a humiliating surrender of sovereignty the Protocol and its Windsor Prop represent.
“Bad enough when a supposedly sovereign nation can’t control its own borders, but how much more abasing when it establishes an internal border at the behest and under the control of a foreign power. That is precisely what the Irish Sea Border is!”