May I set out the tests, as I was asked to?
The Government need to show that this is also the only means whereby they can safeguard the interest in question. The difficulty they potentially have there is
that article 13 of the protocol makes provision for a renegotiation, which most of us would think is the right route to solve these problems, and that in the event of emergency measures, which one might think might be closer to meeting the test of an “imminent peril”, we would then use the unilateral safeguarding provisions under article 16. It might be difficult to argue that necessity is met if we have not attempted and cannot demonstrate that we have attempted those routes first, before moving unilaterally to breaching the protocol.