Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots,

a spectator's daily politics podcast.

I'm Katie Balls and I'm joined by James Lecife and James, it's Brexit that's leading the news today.

We had David Frost speech yesterday on the Northern Ireland Protocol and today we're going to be hearing from the EU.

What's at stake here?

David Frost, the minister, charged

with the protocol. It was really calling for a complete rewrite. David Frost is trying to suggest

that what is at stake here is whether the UK and the EU can get out of this rut, I think you could

say, in relations where everything is tense and the two sides are snapping in each other on a very

regular basis his argument was if you could fix the protocol you fix the biggest irritant in

UK-EU relations and you allow them to have more constructive relations going forward at the end of

his speech he says look the challenges facing the West are so great that you can't we all be divided on these issues let's going to try and move beyond that

now i think the tension is going to come in that the EU feel hang a second you guys signed this

agreement just two years ago and the EU feels that its offer is

in the phrase they've used in their briefings overnight, you know, it's at the outer edges of

EU law and that they can't go that much further. I think things are a little bit hopeful. I think

there is clearly, I think we're clearly in a negotiating space rather

than an immediate UK trigger of Article 16 or anything like that. And I think that you can with

imagination see how, you know, even this ECJ red line you could resolve you know it's worth noting that the the UK EU

trade and cooperation agreement that has a kind of role for the ECJ but the role for the

ECJ there is in interpreting EU law and there's a kind of there's a kind of initial buffer zone before you get to the ECJ.

I think there's some talk.

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