The prospect of better UK-EU relations is good for our country - Yorkshire Post Letters

It’s unsurprising Boris Johnson probably won’t be supporting Rishi Sunak’s ‘Windsor Framework’ deal with the European Union (The Yorkshire Post, March 3).

The prospect of better UK-EU relations is good for our country – especially Northern Ireland. But anything perceived as success for our current Prime Minister is bad for whatever may be left of his predecessor’s political career.

It’s hard to believe there’s anything more noble behind Mr Johnson’s comments than that.

North Yorkshire MP Mr Sunak heads a party at least as dysfunctional as when David Cameron offered his Eurosceptics a referendum.

Clearly, the Conservative Party is no better off because of it; just Britain poorer – and not just economically.

Ironically, though it may have been bad for NI politically, even the arrangements Mr Johnson’s Government agreed to did it a favour economically – at least when compared to what the rest of Britain has had to endure because of his disastrous “oven-ready Brexit”.

Notoriously, the Conservative’s Morley and Outwood MP Andrea Jenkyns – best remembered during her 110-day stint as an education minister for showing a Downing Street crowd the middle finger – once dismissed NI as “miles away” from her constituency.

Technically true, but you can imagine firms in her constituency and elsewhere in Yorkshire clamouring for the kind of “world’s most exciting economic zone” EU plus Britain trade access Mr Sunak has just agreed to for NI.

That, or follow the advice of another Tory Brexiter called Andrea, former House of Commons leader Andrea Leadsom, to “invest in Northern Ireland” to get single market access.

In the short term, a buoyant NI economy could be good for Yorkshire if it adds to the political pressure to put Boris Johnson’s catastrophic deal behind us and negotiate better trade access for the whole of Britain. But let’s not wait too long. For firms that do want single market access, neither NI nor alternative European growth and relocation opportunities are that far away.