Hoey and Habib both voted FOR the protocol when it came before the respective parliaments in which they were sitting at the time, so they may have a problem convincing the judge. Unless that is they can convince him they were not of sound mind - which in their cases is not impossible I suppose.
The leaders of the DUP, UUP, TUV and others demanded that the government take “immediate action” to remove the internal border.
If a judicial review is held, the judge will have to decide some highly complex constitutional matters involving international law the GFA and the TCA. The whole thing is bound to end up at the Supreme Court and who knows what that will mean? A constitutional crisis I assume.
I must have said a dozen times how for something which hardly figured at all in the 2016 referendum, the Irish border keeps coming back to set the direction of Brexit. It's as if we are firmly anchored and as the wind changes direction, the rudderless ship Brexit swings helplessly this way and that, never quite shaking itself free.
It was all dismissed as nothing in 2016 and yet here we are still wrestling with the conundrum.
Johnsons pledges to Ireland have all proved worthless - as indeed most of his pledge do. All that is except one. He told Ireland on a visit there in early 2016 that the Irish border will remain "absolutely unchanged" and that is the problem. You cannot have two sovereign states, each with its own customs tariffs and standards and the right to regulate as it sees fit, without a border.
If the existing north/south 'border' remains absolutely unchanged, as it must under the GFA, the only other place is east/west downs the Irish sea. There is no alternative and the latest madcap scheme to avoid confronting reality is this 'mutual enforcement' system where both sides make it illegal to ship non-complying goods to the other.
If this worked it would have the effect of rendering all the borders in the world, or at least all the ones between friendly states, irrelevant overnight. I am confident this will not happen.
And it isn't even a new idea, it has been raised before and rejected. When it's rejected again somebody will come up with another plan and another. It's like repeatedly hurling yourself at the foot of the Eiger hoping it might shift.
But the move by unionists to fire a warning shot via the letter should be deeply worrying because it is exactly what people were most concerned about at the time and brings closer the prospect of conflict flaring up again. It is what everyone on these islands should fear.
Unionists truly expect Johnson, the architect of all their problems, to come up with an alternative design which would alleviate the tensions and return the province to a peaceful path - but without using any of the possible tools which might bring such a solution about.
There can be no membership of the EU customs union, although the difference in the tariff schedules is microscopic. Membership of the single market is out because Britain would become a rule taker. We can't even align our food and SPS standards because..... well because we can't. It would mean following the food standards we have been following for years and years and that is now quite impossible. Sovereignty would be tainted by submitting to the European Court of Justice.
And yet, bizarrely to achieve Brexit we are forced to divide the nation, which must surely represent the greatest loss of sovereignty imaginable. How sovereign was Germany at Potsdam? Or Korea after 1945 when the USA and the Soviet Union carved it up?
Unionists in Northern Ireland are not easily placated. The peace since 1998 has been an uneasy one but time is a great healer and after twenty years things were starting to look more normal. The border was invisible and nobody spoke about it or bothered about it. Now all that progress has been put at risk by the reckless stupidity of one man. Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.
The sooner he is gone, the better.
