Brexit 

Express
LORD FROST warned of a breakdown in Brexit talks with the EU as he reiterated the UK is ready to rip up the Northern Ireland Protocol.
The Brexit minister warned the UK was making little progress in negotiations with Brussels over problems caused by the Northern Ireland Protocol. Britain has warned bureaucratic checks introduced on trade across the Irish Sea as part of the withdrawal agreement are having a negative impact on the UK’s internal market.
The introduction of a series of customs checks have been postponed until the end of September while the two sides discuss solutions to the problems caused.
But giving evidence to a House of Lords committee this afternoon, Lord Frost painted a bleak picture of the progress in negotiations.
“I think it’s fair to say there are probably 20 or more different strands to the outstanding problems. Some of them are quite fundamental,” he said.
“There’s quite a long list of those and I think it’s fair to say we haven’t made the progress we would really like to in moving any of those forward.” 

Independent
David Frost says he understands why businesses are abandoning trade with Northern Ireland  because his Brexit agreement has made it “too much trouble” to carry on.
The negotiator of the deal – which created a border in the Irish Sea – admitted he had not fully foreseen the “chilling effect” of the punishing new red tape, which has left smaller firms facing higher costs.
There are “companies in Great Britain who decide that it’s all too much trouble, reasonably enough – can’t be bothered to engage with the process,” Lord Frost acknowledged.
“They are often SMEs [small and medium-sized enterprises] and micro-businesses. Dealing with this is a significant call on their time and they decide it’s just not worth it,” he told a parliamentary inquiry.
“That’s why you are seeing some of the trade diversion and supply-chain issues to Northern Ireland that we’re seeing.” 

EU 

Express
BRUSSELS dumped more than 800 new pieces of regulation upon Northern Ireland without notice, according to Cabinet Office officials, in a move criticised by a senior minister.
Brexit minister Lord Frost told peers that the development showed the  European Union was failing to take “seriously” that it was making laws “for another territory” after Brexit. The comments come after the Cabinet Office said Brussels sprung an update on it that more than 600 new measures impacting upon Northern Ireland had been adopted by the bloc in the past three months, with a further 200 in the pipeline. The Northern Ireland Protocol is aimed at avoiding a hard border with Ireland by effectively keeping Northern Ireland in the EU’s single market for goods.
The move, much to the annoyance of Unionists, means the region continues to follow Brussels rules while not having a say in them.
The Joint Consultative Working Group was set-up as part of the UK’s divorce deal with the bloc in order to give businesses in Northern Ireland advanced notice of regulation changes related to the Protocol.
But peers on the Lords Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland Sub-Committee were told on Wednesday that the EU gave the working group a list of 800 new regulations without prior warning, with more than 600 already agreed by Brussels.
Rebecca Ellis, director of the Northern Ireland/Ireland Unit in the Cabinet Office, said efforts to ensure the working group gave advance notice on changes was “still not there”. 

Express
THE European Union has come under fire after Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey warned he has seen no indication Brussels is prepared to reopen its doors to UK financial service exports.
During Brexit trade negotiations throughout last year, the issue of financial services was largely ignored, but the City of London’s access to the European Union‘s markets has yet to return to anywhere close to normal. Brussels is yet to make a move on whether UK financial rules are “equivalent” to regulation in the bloc – a key condition for granting market access. The EU will only resume its equivalence assessments once its 27 remaining member states formally back a new regulatory cooperation framework with Britain.
However the Bank of England Governor has painted a damning picture of the lack of progress being made on the issue, telling a news conference: “On equivalence, I think it’s fair to say that nothing really has moved forwards.”
On Tuesday, Mr Bailey warned he has no intention of loosening financial rules if the UK sought to attract foreign business to Brexit Britain.
He said in a letter to Chancellor Rishi Sunak: “The UK’s reputation for strong standards, independent regulation and financial stability has been and will remain a crucial component of its attractiveness to internationally active financial institutions.”
But Britons have now firmly lost patience with the EU’s stance on financial services with the UK, demanding Brexit Britain “pull the plug” on the bloc and focus on doing business with the rest of the world. 

Freedom day 

Mail
A fifth of Britons are planning to delete the NHS app before ‘Freedom Day’ amid fears the software could spark a ‘pingdemic’ — which could force millions of people off work, potentially leading to food shortages and rubbish piling up in the streets.    
More than 356,000 people were alerted by the app in the last week of June, figures show, and there are fears this could spiral over the coming months amid mounting cases.
Polling suggests more than a third of 18 to 24-year-olds in the UK have already deleted the app, with another third saying they were considering wiping it from their phones within the next week.  
Among adults of all ages, the proportion debating deleting the app in the next six days was 20 per cent, according to a survey by Savanta ComRes.
Self-isolation rules aren’t due to be relaxed for fully jabbed Britons until mid-August, which has led to fears many will delete the app in case a surge in infections post Freedom Day means they get ‘pinged’ and have to quarantine. 
Business leaders have warned that the app could lead to a summer of chaos after Monday, when most remaining Covid curbs are due to be lifted. Lidl has party blamed empty shelves at some of its stores on so many truck drivers having to isolate. 
And councils have raised concerns over bin collections after Leeds, Bristol and Rochdale were forced to leave resident’s rubbish on the curbside after the app forced workers to stay at home. 

Vaccine passport 

Breitbart
The United Kingdom could follow the lead of the European Union and Communist China in implementing a digital ID out of a “redeployed” vaccine passport, a firm developing a health pass for the government has said.
Civil rights campaigners have warned that “mission creep” could result in the UK using a vaccine passport as a pseudo national ID card after an American IT company contracted by the British government to develop a “Covid Certification” pass suggested that the health passes could become part of the “new normal”.
Entrust, which describes itself as a “global leader in identities, payments, and data protection”, was given £250,000 by the UK in May to develop cloud software for the government’s Covid-status certification scheme run by NHSX — the digital arm of the nation’s socialised healthcare system.
In a February blog post, the product marketing director for the firm, Jenn Markey said that “vaccine credentials can become part of the infrastructure of the new normal”.
“With the infrastructure and investment necessary to ensure a viable vaccine passport, why not redeploy this effort into a national citizen ID program that can be used for multiple purposes, including the secure delivery of government services, secure cross-border travel, and documentation of vaccination,” she suggested. 

Face masks 

Telegraph
It’s arguably the most divisive aspect of the last fifteen months and the row over face coverings isn’t going anywhere come 19 July, when nearly all legal restrictions on social contact will be lifted. The division may be tiresome, but the debate matters. “This is not nothing’, Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson tells this week’s Planet Normal podcast, which you can listen to using the audio player above. “It changes the character and the feel of society, and I really feel that the getting back to normal is presented as the reckless thing. On the contrary, I think being too cautious is rapidly becoming the reckless thing.”
For Pearson, the debate is cultural as well as scientific: “I do think we’re going to see the Labour strongholds, the cities, masked up, pretending they’re morally superior to the rest of us, and outside the M25 and more “normal” areas, shall we say, mask-wearing will drop off entirely.”
For Pearson’s podcast co-host Liam Halligan, the fact that the government continues to recommend face masks, despite there being no legal mandate to wear one from Monday, means a different prediction: “I do think the finger-waving classes are going to be getting in the face of the more free-thinking classes and I do think there will be conflict.” For Halligan, differing guidance on face coverings across the four nations of the UK after July 19 is an “absolute mess”: “I wish there was a stipulation one way or another.”, he tells listeners.  

Similar stories can be seen in the Guardian, Times, Evening Standard, Order-Order, Mail
 

Levelling up 

Express
BORIS Johnson will today promise that his plan to “level up” the UK will boost living standards in every part of the country.
In a speech about his post-Covid recovery plan, the Prime Minister is to set out his hopes of restoring a “sense of pride” in communities that have felt neglected for decades. But he will also insist his plans will tackle the soaring house prices and lengthening commuter journeys that blight supposedly better-off areas. “We will have made progress in Levelling Up when we have begun to raise living standards spread opportunity, improved our public services and restored people’s sense of pride in their community,” he is expected to tell his audience on a visit to the West Midlands.
His speech is expected to be seen as an attempt to reassure Tory MPs in the south of England that his vision is not abandoning the party’s traditional heartlands in the hope of holding onto the “Red Wall” former Labour seats captured in the North at the 2019 general election.
Mr Johnson will argue that spreading prosperity and opportunity more evenly across the entire UK will prevent economic “overheating” caused by population surges into a few well-heeled enclaves. 

Similar stories can be found in the Mail, Telegraph, Mirror, ITV News 

Sugar tax 

Mail
Britain should introduce the world’s first tax on sugary and salty food, a report recommends today.
The ‘snack tax’ could add £3.4billion a year to families’ shopping bills, with a 60p Mars bar costing 9p more.
With 56million people currently living in England, it means £60-per-year will be added to each person’s food bill on average – £240 for a family of four.
The money should be used to pay for GPs to prescribe fruit, vegetables and cookery classes on the NHS to help prevent obesity and ill-health, the Government-commissioned review says. 
The radical proposals are included in a new National Food Strategy, published today by Boris Johnson‘s food tsar, Henry Dimbleby, the founder of restaurant chain Leon. 
Mr Dimbleby said the tax will encourage firms to reformulate their recipes or reduce portion sizes. He warned that unhealthy food was ‘putting an intolerable strain on the NHS’, with more than half of over-45s living with diet-related health conditions.
Poor diets contribute to 64,000 deaths every year in England and cost the economy an estimated £74 billion, according to his report. 

Similar stories can be found in the Telegraph, Times, Guardian, Sun, ITV News, BBC News 

Scotland 

Express
A HARD border would need to be constructed between Scotland and England if Scottish voters opted to sever ties with the rest of the United Kingdom for the EU, the immigration minister has said.
Kevin Foster, Conservative MP for Torbay, said on his trip to Scotland there would need to be a “great wall of Gretna” if Scotland voted “Yes” in a second independence referendum and opted to join the European Union. The Home Office minister suggested that, if Scotland signed up to the Schengen agreement, a Brussels-based scheme that enables free travel without passport checks between EU member states, Holyrood would need to establish a hard border between England and Scotland.
Speaking to journalists in Linlithgow, West Lothian, Foster said: “If they [the SNP] wanted Scotland to join Schengen that does mean a hard border, it means building a great wall of Gretna.”
The Scottish First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, struggled during the recent Scottish Parliament elections to explain how Scotland could be a part of the EU and not erect a border with a neighbouring country outside of the Single Market.
And the border question appears to be a salient issue in the minds of Scottish voters.
Previous polling conducted by Survation found Scots were less likely to support independence if there was a risk of erecting a hard border with England. 

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