BBC News 27 April 2022
Responsibility for the Northern Ireland part of the Brexit deal lies "fairly and squarely with the UK government", a former top Stormont civil servant has said.
Dr Andrew McCormick, who was the executive's lead on Brexit, said the UK government understood the implications of the NI Protocol.
He dismissed any notion the protocol was "anti-democratic".
The protocol was agreed by the UK and the EU in October 2019 and came into force in January 2021.
It prevents a hard Irish border by keeping Northern Ireland inside the EU's single market for goods.
That also creates a new trade border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.
The deal is opposed by unionists, who argue it undermines Northern Ireland's place in the UK.
The UK government has since said it was a huge compromise on their part, and accused the EU of applying it too rigidly.
The EU accepts that the protocol is causing difficulties for businesses and has proposed a package of measures to reduce its practical impacts.
Dr McCormick, who witnessed the initial Brexit negotiations first hand, criticised the UK government's attitude towards the protocol in an article for the Constitution Society.
"It is hard to imagine anything (other than Brexit itself) with greater democratic legitimacy under the UK constitution.
"There is little credibility in any argument that the UK government either did not anticipate the implications of what it had agreed, or was constrained and unable to choose any other option.
"The facts and choices had been spelt out clearly over the whole period from 2016 onwards and the detail of the provisions (notably most of the applicable EU law contained in Annex 2 to the Protocol) were known at latest in autumn 2018."
Dr McCormick, who retired last year as director general of International Relations for the Northern Ireland Executive Office, said "no credible solution better than the protocol has been identified".
"Hence, its collapse would create uncertainty and instability - which cannot be in the interests of those who want Northern Ireland to succeed," he added.
Meanwhile, former Brexit minister Lord Frost has claimed the protocol was only supposed to be temporary.
Speaking at a meeting hosted by the centre-right think tank Policy Exchange on Wednesday, he accused the EU of treating his negotiating team as "the supplicant representatives of a renegade province".
He said he had assumed it would last only until Stormont voted on whether to keep the accord in 2024.
In the Commons on Wednesday, Labour told UK ministers to stop threatening action over the protocol and "get a grip" on talks with the EU.
Shadow Northern Ireland minister Tonia Antoniazzi said: "Will the Government get a grip on treating negotiations with the respect they deserve and use something called statecraft and diligence to fund a settlement with the European Union?"
Labour issued the warning ahead of Prime Minister Boris Johnson telling MPs of the need to rectify the issue for the sake of the Good Friday Agreement - the 1998 peace deal which helped bring an end to the Troubles.
The prime minister said there was "clearly an economic cost" to the protocol, adding it was "now turning into a political problem".
