We should expect nothing from Boris Johnson but endless playing to the gallery

To strike favourable trade deals around the world Britain needs to be seen as a country that respects the rights of other nations to protect their own economies; seeks to negotiate fairly to meet on common ground; and can be trusted to honour an agreement, legally and morally. Alarm bells must surely ring when those countries watch Britain’s shenanigans with the EU.

The nature of any common trading area is that it is ring fenced and you are either inside, and trade freely, or outside, and can only trade in accordance with your trade agreement. Britain chose to be outside of the EU customs union and therefore is not allowed to trade freely in the way it did when it was inside.

The Good Friday Agreement was only ever a standoff in which the parties agreed to have equal political power while the Northern Ireland economy enjoyed being integrated with both the rest of the UK and the Republic of Ireland. That was feasible because all of the economies were in the EU. Until Boris Johnson came along, the UK government worked on a soft Brexit that enabled Northern Ireland to continue to have a foot in both the UK and the Republic of Ireland. The moment Johnson chose a hard Brexit, a hard border was inevitable, and realistically, it had to be the sea border between Northern Ireland  and the rest of the UK rather than the land border.

With Johnson we can only anticipate more playing to the gallery; obfuscation of the real merits and costs of new trade deals; disillusionment by potential trading parties; and friction in Northern Ireland when it finally dawns on the loyalists that it is a fait accompli. Their economy is now tied to the Republic of Ireland and not the rest of the UK.

We must hope that the republicans in Northern Ireland keep quiet so the loyalists vent their anger primarily at the UK and their own leadership. Quite why the US, with its republican sympathies, should seek to intervene is another mystery.

Jon Hawksley

France

The obvious solution to getting chilled meat products into Northern Ireland is to source them in the Irish Republic. Both Lidl and Tesco supermarket chains have branches in both Belfast and Dublin and they are surely getting their chilled meat products from their distribution centres in the Irish Republic.

Michael Heppner

London N21

It is ironic that the UK is hosting the meeting of the world’s richest democracies at a time when our prime minister is systematically dismantling our democratic state in order to create a self-perpetuating autocracy to serve his own, and not the nation’s, best interests.

As witnessed at yet another appalling Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, his serial use of misinformation and untruths – heaven forfend that I call them lies – should tell other G7 leaders one thing: don’t believe a word of what Boris Johnson promises; he’ll promise the opposite once he’s out of the room.

Graham Powell

Cirencester

From all the opposition sides, one expects virtue signalling. But the degree of humbug shown from the so-called Tory rebels in Tuesday’s debate on foreign aid was difficult to take. If foreign aid is so vital, why was it ever restricted to 0.7 per cent in the first place? Surely it should have been 1.4 per cent, or double again to 2.8 per cent?

The breast-beating from the likes of Roger Gale, David Davis and Andrew Mitchell et al stems from just one of several examples of gesture politics originally instigated by David Cameron. It is nauseating.

Edward Thomas

Eastbourne

I am getting heartily fed up with supposedly intelligent people trying to tell me how I should think in the name of being “woke”.

What the heck is “woke” in the first place? All the definitions I have seen have a common thread, that we should wake up to the atrocities perpetrated by our forebears and consign them to a mighty vault from which truth and reason and learning should never escape. It would be nice to think that things like slavery never existed, or that Genghis Khan did not maraud through Asia.

I do not think so. Do these people believe that by waking people’s attention to the atrocities of the past they will go away?

David Janes

Nottingham