WASHINGTON (AP) — The Federal Reserve’s bank supervisors warned Silicon Valley Bank’s management as early as the fall of 2021 of risks stemming from its unusual business model, a top Fed official said Tuesday, but its managers failed to take the steps necessary to fix the problems.

The Fed official, Michael Barr, the nation’s top banking regulator, said during a Senate Banking Committee hearing that the Fed is considering whether stronger bank rules are needed to prevent a similar failure in the future.

Silicon Valley Bank’s management was deficient, Barr said. In particular, he said, the interest rate model the bank used “was not at all aligned with reality.”

The timeline that Barr laid out for when the Fed had alerted Silicon Valley’s management to the risks it faced is earlier than the central bank has previously said the bank was on its radar screen.

Tuesday’s hearing was the first formal congressional inquiry into the March 10 collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and the subsequent failure of New York-based Signature Bank, the second- and third-largest bank failures in U.S. history.

The failures set off financial tremors in the U.S. and Europe and led the Fed and other government agencies to back all deposits at the two banks, even though nearly 90% of both banks’ deposits exceeded the $250,000 insurance threshold. The Fed also established a new lending program to enable banks to more easily raise cash if needed.

Late Sunday, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said that resolving the two banks, including reimbursing depositors, would cost its insurance fund $20 billion, the largest such impact in its history. The FDIC plans to recoup those funds through a levy on all banks, which will likely be passed on to consumers.

Sen. Sherrod Brown, the Ohio Democrat who leads the committee, suggested that the government’s rescue of SVB’s depositors, which included wealthy venture capitalists and large tech companies, had caused “justified anger” among many Americans.

“I understand why many Americans are angry — even disgusted — at how quickly the government mobilized, when a bunch of elites in California were demanding it,” Brown said.

Republican members of the committee focused their fire on the Fed and other regulators for failing to prevent SVB’s failure. The Fed has been criticized by advocacy groups for not adequately responding to red flags about the bank’s management.

“I hope to learn how the Federal Reserve could know about such risky practices for more than a year and failed to take definitive, corrective action,” said Sen. Tim Scott, Republican from South Carolina. “By all accounts, our regulators appear to have been asleep at the wheel.”

Several senators have introduced bills that would tighten bank regulation or raise the FDIC’s $250,000 threshold. But given the partisan divisions in Congress on those issues, few expect such proposals to become law.

Silicon Valley’s deposits were heavily concentrated in the high-tech sector, which made it particularly vulnerable to a downturn in a single industry. It had bought long-term Treasurys and other bonds with those funds.

The value of those bonds fell as interest rates rose. When the bank was forced to sell those bonds to repay depositors as they withdrew funds, Silicon Valley absorbed heavy losses and couldn’t pay its customers.

Barr said that depositors withdrew $42 billion — equal to about a quarter of the bank’s assets — on the Thursday before the bank failed. On Friday morning, it faced an additional $100 billion in withdrawal requests.

Barr said the Fed’s review of Silicon Valley’s collapse will consider whether stricter regulations are needed, including whether supervisors have the tools needed to follow up on their warnings. The Fed will also consider whether tougher rules are needed on liquidity — the ability of the bank to access cash — and capital requirements, which govern the level of funds a bank needs to hold.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell has said he will support any regulatory changes that are proposed by Barr.

Last September, before the banks’ collapse, Barr had said he was conducting a “holistic review” of the government’s capital requirements. He suggested that he might support toughening those requirements, which prompted criticism from the banking industry and Republican senators.

Barr also said in prepared remarks that the Fed will review whether a 2018 law that weakened stricter bank rules also contributed to the financial turmoil.

“SVB’s failure is a textbook case of mismanagement,” Barr said.

At the hearing, some Senate Republicans questioned whether new rules were needed and noted that the Fed had had the authority to force Silicon Valley to address its shortcomings.

“I can’t think of another rule, or law, or regulation, that you needed,” said Sen. Cynthia Lummis, a Republican from Wyoming.

Martin Gruenberg, chairman of the FDIC, and Nellie Liang, the Treasury undersecretary for domestic finance, also testified Tuesday. On Wednesday, all three will testify to a House committee.

Gruenberg said the FDIC, which insures bank deposits, and the Fed and Treasury took steps to protect the two banks’ depositors to prevent a broader bank run, in which customers swiftly withdraw their funds and which can cause even healthy banks to buckle.

“I think there would have been a contagion,” Gruenberg said, “and I think we would have been in a worse situation today.”

Gruenberg said that the top 10 depositors at Silicon Valley held $13.3 billion in their accounts. That is an enormous figure that reflects the wealth of many of its customers, which included large companies such as Roku, the streaming video company, which held about $500 million in an SVB account.

The banking turmoil has intensified questions about whether the $250,000 deposit cap, which was enacted after the 2008 financial crisis, should be increased or eliminated entirely.

Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at the tax advisory firm RSM, argued Tuesday that the current limit disadvantages small and mid-size banks because only the biggest banks are perceived as “too big to fail.” Many financial firms have shifted their money to larger banks to take advantage of that, Brusuelas said.

“Policymakers need to address ways to expand deposit insurance as soon as possible to prevent a wider crisis,” he said.

Simon Johnson, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist who co-wrote a book about the 2008-2009 financial crisis, said there could be bipartisan support for proposals to raise the $250,000 insurance limit for the bank deposits of companies that must meet payrolls and pay bills.

Such an expansion, Johnson said, is “quite doable and entirely reasonable. It’s a good idea.”

Democratic senators charged that the failures can be attributed, to some extent, to the 2018 softening of the stricter bank regulations that were enacted by the 2010 Dodd-Frank law.

The 2018 law exempted banks with assets between $100 billion to $250 billion — Silicon Valley’s size — from requirements that it maintain sufficient cash, or liquidity, to cover 30 days of withdrawals. It also meant that banks of that size were subject less often to so-called “stress tests,” which sought to evaluate how they would fare in a sharp recession or a financial meltdown.

___

AP Economics Writer Paul Wiseman contributed to this report.

Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The nation’s top financial regulator is asserting that Silicon Valley Bank’s own management was largely to blame for the bank’s failure earlier this month and says the Federal Reserve will review whether a 2018 law that weakened stricter bank rules also contributed to its collapse.

“SVB’s failure is a textbook case of mismanagement,” Michael Barr, the Fed’s vice chair for supervision, said in written testimony that will be delivered Tuesday at a hearing of the Senate Banking Committee.

Barr pointed to the bank’s “concentrated business model,” in which its customers were overwhelmingly venture capital and high-tech firms in Silicon Valley. He also contends that the bank failed to manage the risk of its bond holdings, which lost value as the Fed raised interest rates.

Silicon Valley was seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. on March 10 in the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history. Late Sunday, the FDIC said that First Citizens Bank, based in Raleigh, North Carolina, had agreed to buy about one third of Silicon Valley’s assets — about $72 billion — at a discount of about $16.5 billion. The FDIC said its deposit insurance fund would take a $20 billion hit from its rescue of SVB, a record amount, in part because it agreed to backstop all deposits at the bank, including those above a $250,000 cap.

The Senate Banking Committee will hold the first formal congressional hearing on the failures of Silicon Valley Bank and New York-based Signature Bank and the shortcomings of supervision and regulation, by the Fed and other agencies, that preceded them. The committee will also likely question Barr and other officials about the government’s response, including its emergency decision to insure all the deposits at both banks, even as the vast majority exceeded the $250,000 limit.

Martin Gruenberg, chairman of the FDIC, and Nellie Liang, the Treasury undersecretary for domestic finance, will also testify at the Senate hearing. On Wednesday, all three will testify to a House committee.

Gruenberg said in his prepared testimony that the FDIC, which insures bank deposits, will investigate and potentially impose financial penalties on executives and board members of the two failed banks. The FDIC can also seek to bar them from working in the financial industry again.

Members of Congress will surely use the hearings to stake out their positions on issues raised by the bank failures. These issues include whether the $250,000 limit on federal deposit insurance should be raised, a change that would require Congress’ approval.

Also sure to be debated will be whether the failures can be blamed, to some extent, on the 2018 softening of the stricter bank regulations that were enacted by the 2010 Dodd-Frank law.

The Fed will evaluate whether “higher levels of capital and liquidity would have forestalled the bank’s failure or provided further resilience to the bank,” Barr said.

The 2018 law exempted banks with assets between $100 billion to $250 billion — Silicon Valley’s size — from requirements that it maintain sufficient cash, or liquidity, to cover 30 days of withdrawals. It also meant that banks of that size were subject less often to so-called “stress tests,” which sought to evaluate how they would fare in a sharp recession or a financial meltdown.

Simon Johnson, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who co-wrote a book about the 2008-2009 financial crisis, said he believed the 2018 regulatory rollback “contributed to a big relaxation of supervision and fed into this lackadaisical attitude around Silicon Valley Bank.’’

The two bank failures, Johnson said, suggest that banks with $100 billion to $250 billion in assets can pose a risk to the entire financial system. The reduction of rules for banks of that size was based on the idea that they didn’t pose a systemic risk.

But Steven Kelly, senior research associate at the Yale program on financial stability, said he believed that Silicon Valley Bank’s business model was so flawed that requiring it to hold more liquidity wouldn’t have helped it withstand the lightning-fast bank run that toppled it. On Thursday, March 9, depositors — many of them operating swiftly, using smart phones — withdrew $42 billion, or 20% of its assets, in a single day.

“You’re never going to write liquidity regulations that are strict enough to prevent that, when there’s a run on a fundamentally unviable bank,” Kelly said.

In his prepared testimony, Barr also pledged that the Federal Reserve and other agencies would take whatever steps they deem necessary to protect depositors and the banking system. Regulators “are prepared to use all of our tools for any size institution, as needed, to keep the system safe and sound,” he said.

The Fed has come under harsh criticism by groups advocating tighter financial regulation for failing to adequately supervise Silicon Valley Bank and prevent its collapse, and Barr will likely face tough questioning by members of both parties.

Barr said he would ensure that the Fed “fully accounts for any supervisory or regulatory failings” in a previously announced review of the bank’s collapse.

He said officials at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, which directly supervised Silicon Valley Bank, had sent multiple warnings to the bank’s management about the risks it was taking, including its substantial holdings of Treasurys and other bonds that were steadily losing value as interest rates rose.

As recently as mid-February 2023, Barr says in his prepared testimony, Fed staffers told the central bank’s board of governors that rising rates were threatening the finances of some banks and highlighted, in particular, the risk-taking at Silicon Valley Bank.

“But, as it turned out,” Barr says, “the full extent of the bank’s vulnerability was not apparent until the unexpected bank run on March 9.”

___

AP Economics Writer Paul Wiseman contributed to this report.

Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

When I call Posie Parker the Nigel Farage of Terfs, I mean it as a compliment. I can’t think of another single-issue campaigner so effective at popular communication, so successful in reordering the political landscape — and so reviled for it by the Respectable People whose political gatekeeping both Farage and Posie blithely ignore.

Twitter is still full of otherwise seemingly nice people, fantasising about a world in which Farage had died horribly in his 2010 plane crash. And where Posie — AKA Kellie-Jay Keen —  is concerned, the murderous fantasies are even more openly expressed. Over the weekend, Keen faced a baying mob of counter-protesters at her Let Women Speak event in New Zealand. She left without addressing the crowd, and later described the swarm around her, whipped up by calls to “kill the Nazi”, as “completely rabid”. She claims she thought that “this was it” and she was about to be crushed to death.

The mob smashed down barricades and roared their rage, one spattering her with red soup designed to symbolise blood. Keen, five feet nothing, seemed almost swallowed by the seething mass of haters.

What happened last weekend in New Zealand isn’t confined to one side of an otherwise principled political debate, in which a few bad actors are spoiling things for everyone else. It’s the latest instance of a post-democratic style of politics now well on its way to being the new normal.

It follows a pattern inseparable from the viral power of social media and its anonymous denizens: a fusion of “high” and “low” politics, in which Farage was a definitive innovator. But if Farage pioneered this populist style, it’s now being wielded far more widely — including to defend the status quo.

I’m perhaps a relative outlier among Britain’s broadly liberal-Left-inclined Terf sorority, many of whom were horrified by Brexit. I was on the ground in 2016 handing out Vote Leave flyers. Even then, it struck me as significant that there were not one but two Brexit campaigns. When it came to boots on the ground, the two “sides” worked together amiably enough — but the class and cultural differences were palpable.

The split was roughly along the lines I have characterised as Virtuals and Physicals: knowledge workers and real-world workers. Vote Leave addressed itself to the “respectable” mainstream, which is to say, the Virtuals. They put up media spokespeople who said carefully tuned things about regulations and democracy and taking back control. Its volunteers were mostly, like me, middle-class. Farage’s side, Grassroots Out, recruited from and spoke more to those among the Physicals who supported Brexit. To this end, GO used much more direct language and populist tropes, and was far less restrained than Vote Leave about referencing certain less polite aspects of the issue: such as the fact that, for some, Brexit really was about immigration.

Farage and Keen have a great deal in common. Both are Marmite figures, as iconic in look, manner and rhetorical directness as they are loathed by the bien pensant. Both are gifted communicators, skilled at being heard beyond their bubbles. Both have, as a result, faced accusations from their own side of turning their respective campaigns into a “cult of personality”.

And both are accused of flirting with “the far-Right”. This is as you’d expect. In the 21st century, Progress means the unbounded forward march of commerce and technology. And any effort at all to set any limits on that forward march, by calling for limits on the free global movement of low-skilled labour, for example, makes you far-Right by definition. As for asserting a sexed limit to self-identification, this also amounts to standing athwart the march of commerce and technology, yelling “Stop!”. Sorry, Posie: you’re also far-Right.

This definition expands, too, beyond Keen to everyone who knows biology exists, making any effort at positioning oneself as “one of the Left-wing Terfs” mostly a futile exercise in self-muzzling. Even so, it’s applied with particular vehemence to anyone who, like Farage and Keen, demonstrates a talent for mobilising protest campaigns among the masses upon whom this model of Progress imposes the highest cost and least upside.

But this is only one side of an effective 21st-century political campaign. Even as Keen’s voice has reached mainstream women, the other gender-critical campaign — the side analogous to Vote Leave — has also flourished, at one remove from the rambunctious, plain-speaking populist one. This growing ecosystem of campaigning groups and other bodies stays meticulously within the norms of civil discourse, and orients itself less toward public awareness than regulatory and policy shifts. Transgender Trend, for example, produces resource packs to help schools support gay and gender diverse youth while protecting appropriate sex segregation. Sex Matters seeks to uphold the political and legal salience of biological sex across the board. It is, in essence, the Grassroots Out/Vote Leave model.

It is meaningless to say one or the other is more effective: they are complementary. And in this new, twin-faced digital-era template for politics, the official electoral process is rendered largely irrelevant. Its Virtual aspect is led by named figures, who play ostentatiously by the liberal rules: open debate, civil discourse, equality before the law and so on — all while working assiduously behind the scenes to capture supposedly neutral institutions and deploy their power in service to campaign objectives. This form of pre-political politics then uses institutional power to shape the parameters of the political space itself, thus controlling what is or isn’t on offer to voters at the polling booth. On the liberal side, the transactivist behemoth Stonewall was a trailblazer in this form of politics, and still exerts a startling degree of influence over sex and gender norms via its organisational accreditation programme.

The other face will have controversial lightning-rod front-men or women such as Farage or Keen, but is powered mostly by anonymous social media accounts, whose bios usually carry a plethora of hashtags and insignia announcing their allegiance to campaigns or issues. This side can be swiftly mobilised to fill in petitions, show up to protests, and dogpile opponents. Being anonymous, they’re also largely exempt in practice if not in theory from the formal rules of liberal civil discourse. As such they serve as crucial shock troops in any single-issue campaign.

But this Janus-faced campaigning model, first seen during the EU referendum, isn’t just for dissidents. Rather, its success during Brexit set a new political template that has since been widely adopted. Recently characterised by political economist Thomas Prosser as “low liberalism”, this social media-driven form of political discourse pursues liberal aims via sometimes starkly illiberal means, for example the emerging “liberal defence of no-platforming”, or the wholesale delegitimisation of opponents as evil or bad actors.

Prosser sees low liberalism as emerging in the aftermath of the Trump/Brexit revolt, as a popular defence of the status quo against Right-populism. Its first UK manifestation was probably the #FBPE movement that sprang up, first on social media but subsequently in new publications and sometimes very large street demonstrations, to give mass voice to those who rejected Brexit and sought to reverse the referendum; it has since mutated to encompass multiple issues.

The mob that gathered to dogpile Kellie-Jay Keen in New Zealand over the weekend is a textbook example of low liberalism. And such low-liberal mobs serve exactly the same purpose as any other swarm of hashtag ideologues. That is, they serve as authoritarian shock troops for others who benefit politically from their actions but prefer not to be tainted with their methods. The antipodean politicians and journalists who first demonised Kellie-Jay Keen as undesirable, then refused to condemn the mob who left her in fear for her life, can serenely deny any complicity with the violence unleashed upon her. But I dare say a great many of them privately think what low liberals say out loud: Keen deserved everything she got.

And it’s no use wringing our hands and lamenting the loss of civility in politics. We stopped forming liberal democratic citizens a generation ago, as we began to transition from a print-first to a digital-first culture.

And in this new age, the older norms of neutrality, debate, long-form writing, evidence and so on are meaningful and effective only among a shrinking minority. For this group, the principal vector for political influence isn’t the electoral process, but some distance upstream of it. For the rest, whether it’s in service to the onward march of Progress or arrayed against it, demagoguery is the order of the day. Hashtags, video clips, insinuations — and, increasingly, violent mobs.

This post-democratic form of politics now operates by coordinating formal and informal campaign styles, all with the right measure of deniability. You can’t move the political needle if you only have internet crazies — because (as the Capitol rioters discovered in America) you can riot all you like but if you’re not backed up by any institutional power, you’re toast. Equally, without a convincingly large mob of online crazies who can be mobilised to defend your programme, you’re vulnerable to accusations of being one of the “sinister elites” of conspiracy mythology.

Of course, this game is heavily rigged in favour of one team. Covid debates saw the creeping politicisation of everything propagated, with ever greater shamelessness, under the banner of liberal neutrality. And under this order the Good Internet Crazies, the “low liberals”, are routinely given a pass for levels of illiberalism and overall derangement that would have their enemies permanently tarred as beyond the pale.

But the larger point is that in a digital-first culture, there’s no stuffing the post-democratic genie back in the bottle. There’s nothing to be gained from lamenting the end of civility, or reasoned discourse, much-missed though these are. And there’s no point complaining about egregious asymmetries in how bad behaviour is punished, between the Good Crazies (who are just passionate) and the Bad Crazies (who are evil). The only way forward is to stop singing threnodies for a vanished political order, and start thinking strategically about how to survive in the one that replaced it.

The community and voluntary centre will be “devastated overnight” due to the loss of ESF funding a Northern Irish charity has warned, saying it is the result of the Brexit fallout and lack of a functioning government.

On Friday, March 31, the European Social Fund will cease to exist in Northern Ireland and will lead to tens of thousands of vulnerable people losing vital support services that they have relied on for years and countless more having a reduced level of support compared to generations before them.

Gráinne Close, the director of Mencap NI, has said that its employment support services for those with learning disabilities will lose 70% of its funding and that its support infrastructure, which it has developed over the course of 30 years, could disappear overnight.

Read more: Loss of European Social Fund ‘will cripple communities and cost the government more in the long run’

She said that while she is hopeful of a replacement fund for ESF to be announced later this week, not enough has been done to address the issues over the past four years and it is very disappointing that organisations are waiting until the very last minute to discover if they can continue providing support.

Speaking to Belfast Live, Gráinne said that the loss of funding will have a “ripple effect” across Northern Ireland and it is not just those who use Mencap’s services that will be impacted, but families, communities and government departments across the country.

She said: “The emotional upheaval this has caused our colleagues, trainees and their families has just been awful and there are many other organisations like us who are in a similar boat and facing the uncertainty over the loss of ESF funding.

“We are now in a position where we cannot even signpost people in the right direction for support because it is just not there and I fear that if we lose this funding and these services, they will never come back again.

“Mencap has an employment support infrastructure that has been built up over 30 years, so you can imagine the knowledge and skills that have been developed building that up and we could lose it overnight.

“I am holding on to hope for what has been promised to us and there will be a replacement fund. But it must be stressed that the UK Shared Prosperity Fund is not a replacement fund.

“A 30 year infrastructure gone overnight, it is frightening. This is not going to just impact the individual, because there are real lives behind these numbers, but this is looking at their families, their communities, the economy, health service and social justice. There will be an impact on all of this and we will feel a ripple effect from this loss of funding.”

Gráinne said that “broken promises” in the wake of Brexit and a lack of functioning government in Northern Ireland has meant that the loss of funding will have a bigger impact here than Wales or Scotland.

She continued: “The primary issues are twofold, we are looking at the fallout of Brexit and broken promises, where we were promised a replacement fund that has not been delivered.

“We know that there is money in the system, but because there is no functioning government here we are not able to get that money because we need approvals around the mechanisms of moving money from one department to another and without ministers in place and a functioning government, we can’t do that.

“So if you compare us to areas like Wales with its devolved government, they are able to roll the money out and things are happening, they have been able to negotiate with the SPF, but we can’t.

“If Stormont was up and running, a lot more could be done to get this issue resolved.”

Gráinne highlighted how Northern Irish Oscar winner and Mencap Ambassador James Martin , had been a standout success from the employment support services run by Mencap and how the loss of ESF funding will stop future generations from getting the same opportunities that he has.

She also said she is particularly worried that there will be an increase in social isolation for many people with learning disabilities who will no longer have access to support.

She said: “Oscar winner James Martin for example, came to our nursery when he was a baby and that is how his connection with Mencap started and it has continued as he accessed our employment services right through adulthood and has now won an Oscar. Without that support he couldn’t do that.

“These helped him build his confidence and showed that these services are not just about jobs, but supporting trainees and their families and allowing people with learning disabilities to become more independent and a bigger part of the communities.

“The whole premise of the ESF was social inclusion and providing the most marginalised with support and we are at risk of losing that and future generations, even the next James, won’t get that.

“There are a lot out there who have nobody and the employment officer may be the only person they speak to and those are the ones I am really afraid for.

“People feel forgotten about or like second class citizens.

“Our staff also have families and responsibilities and 50 people’s jobs are at risk. These are staff who are very specialised, but the first thing they worried about was the trainees and what will happen to them because they know the impact.

There needs to be a replacement fund for ESF in Northern Ireland in order to ensure that the most marginalised in our society are protected and supported.”

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BELFAST, March 28 (Reuters) – Northern Ireland’s influential Orange Order said it had voted unanimously to oppose any return of devolved government in the British province unless substantial improvements are made to a reworked post-Brexit deal with the European Union.

The move by the 30,000-member pro-British group – which holds large, at times divisive marches each year to celebrate centuries-old military victories – could raise pressure on the Democratic Unionist Party to wring some concessions from London.

The DUP has said it will not drop a year-long boycott of the devolved assembly without “further clarification, re-working and change” of the Windsor Framework, agreed by the British government with the EU to resolve disputes over trade rules in Northern Ireland following Britain’s withdrawal from the EU.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government, keen to improve post-Brexit relations with the EU, insists the deal is not open for renegotiation.

“The Windsor Framework has delivered some limited, but welcome practical adjustments to the existing protocol. However, it does not resolve the fundamental concerns,” the Orange Order said in a statement on Tuesday.

“Many aspects of the Windsor Framework have been oversold. The Windsor Framework continues to treat Northern Ireland as a place apart within the United Kingdom and equal citizenship has not been restored.”

The statement said the Orange Order would not endorse the deal without “substantial and tangible progress which resolves these fundamental issues”.

The DUP, at odds with opinion polls that say most Northern Irish voters support the deal, has raised concerns over the continued role of EU law and Northern Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom’s internal market.

It opposed a key element of the deal in a vote last week that won the overwhelming backing of the British parliament but has said it may yet be convinced to support the agreement if additional concessions are made.

A group of mainly current and former DUP members is due to report back to the party this week on a month-long consultation.

The Orange Order similarly raised “fundamental concern” that Northern Ireland citizens remain subject to EU laws and that the British-run region “continues to be a semi-detached part” of the UK’s economic union.

As part of Brexit, Northern Ireland effectively remained in the bloc’s single market to avoid a hard border with EU-member Ireland. The resultant internal trade boundary with the rest of the UK has angered many pro-British unionists.

The Orange Order said London must introduce new legislation to create fully frictionless trade between Britain and Northern Ireland, and make businesses opt-in to EU laws if they wish to trade in the EU single market.

Business groups have overwhelmingly supported the Windsor Framework, seeing it as removing damaging uncertainties over trading relationships.

Reporting by Amanda Ferguson, writing by Padraic Halpin, editing by Mark Heinrich

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.