Welcome to Brexit and beyond, the podcast from UK and a Changing Europe.

I'm Jill Rutter, Senior Research Fellow at UK and Changing Europe.

And I'm delighted to be joined on the podcast today by our senior fellow Katie Hayward.

The fact that Katie's on the podcast is probably a leading indicator that we're going to talk a bit about Northern Ireland.

But not just Northern Ireland.

So I'm joined as well by our very own Anand Menon, crossing the floor, if you'd like, to be on the other side of

the microphone for once. And he'll get all the difficult questions. So we're going to be

talking about what happened last week. We're recording this on 26th of July. But last week,

the government published its views on how to rebalance that Northern Ireland

protocol. So we're going to be talking about that. But we're also going to be looking more widely

at where the UK-EU relationship is, seven months after the trade and cooperation agreement was

finally signed. Katie, David Frost described this as

proposing a new balance that will lead to a new era, if you like, in UK-EU relations,

away from the sort of fractiousness that have characterized them to date. Is that how you read

the document he published last week? Yes, I think there are two

ways that they have conceiving rebalancing the relationship as they are represented at the

moment in the protocol on Ireland and Northern Ireland. So one is this idea of the UK and the EU

being sovereign equals or equal partners. This of course is a theme that we've seen many times before.

It's written into this in some ways, perhaps most obviously in the request to step down

the role for the Court of Justice. And then we also see a new balance in a slightly different

way, perhaps one that we couldn't have anticipated some time back,

and that is a rebalance between east-west and north-south. So the Good Friday, Belfast

...