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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast.

I'm Isabel Hardman and I'm joined by Katie Balls and James Forsy. Well, James, we've had a

development in the Brexit negotiations today,

and it could actually be quite positive. Do we explain what's happened.

It's not another missed deadline as well. It's that the UK and the EU have reached agreement

in principle on all the remaining issues surrounding the Northern Ireland Protocol.

Now, this is a surprise because the expectation, I think, had been, but these issues

weren't going to get resolved until there was a trade deal, because some of them are much,

much simpler to fix if you've got a zero tariff deal between the UK and the EU. The upshot of

this agreement is that the UK is dropping those clauses from the internal market

bill, which is Brandon Lewis famously put it, broke international law in a very specific and limited

way. Now, I think the big question is what does this mean for the rest of the negotiations?

And I think you can cut this two ways. One way is you can say,

look, this has surely got to improve the atmospherics. It shows how quickly you can get a deal.

Lots of these Norman Ireland protocol issues like on sausage meat, for example, were being

regarded as completely intractable only could be solved in the in the in the in the in the the the the the the the one or me that

would follow an agreement on a deal and yet they've been fixed so you can say look

this this shows that ultimately these things do get sorted out the other way you could put it

is it now means that if the UK and the EU fail to reach an agreement things are less bad

there is a fix on Northern Ireland,

so that should not become, you know, you should not get some of the more worrying things that

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