He said,
“When the head of Marks and Spencer complains about the huge cost and complexity of the Windsor Framework it tells you how bad things are. If one of the UK’s biggest retailers is suffering, then the situation for smaller businesses doing business with Northern Ireland is far worse.
The M&S Chief Executive has pointed out one obvious solution based on digital technology. But the naysayers in the EU and its dinosaur cheerleaders elsewhere insist on bureaucratic processes adding millions of pounds to business costs and restricting consumer choice in Northern Ireland. In addition, hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money is wasted on Trader Support Services in trying to guide businesses through the labyrinth of paperwork and procedures. This is money that could be spent on hospitals and schools.
In fact, this is not the first time M&S has proposed a different way forward. Three years ago, its then Food Managing Director Stuart Machin called for all checks and certifications on the entry of food to Northern Ireland from GB to be replaced by a technology-based solution.
As now, such modern-day solutions were arrogantly dismissed as “magical thinking” despite businesses like M and S and others being at the forefront of technological advances.
The Murphy Review, if it is really going to address the fundamental problems of the Windsor Framework and the Irish Sea Border, needs to go to the likes of M&S and talk seriously to them about solutions that both protect everyone’s interests.
It needs to examine options that actually work while at the same time do not infringe the sovereignty of the UK as the current set up does.
The problem of course is that even if the Murphy review recommended sensible outcomes, it requires Sinn Fein and nationalist backing which they would never give even if it saved public money and made things simpler.
Yet in a show of one-sided bias the Government stripped away the need for unionist consent for the current lamentable arrangements when the Government flagrantly rigged the recent Assembly vote to prevent cross community consent being required.”