Very exciting to be here. But im trying to understand what has happened to this land of yours, because when you arrived here, this was an intensively farmed land, wasnt it . It was. My husband, charlie, inherited it from his grandparents when he was in his early 20s, and this was back in the 1980s. And every inch of the land was ploughed, it was producing arable crops and dairy. And we fully expected to be farmers for the rest of our lives. Mm. 17 years on, we were £1. 5 million in debt, tearing our hair out and realised that, you know, this is very marginal land. Were walking on 320 metres of clay, over a bedrock of limestone, and its an absolute pig to farm. So you were literally close to going out of business . Yeah, the farm was a failing business. And we did everything we could. We diversified, we tried different crops, we tried different cows. We sold ice cream. We did everything we could. But always it was this clay that was against us. So lets just stop for a second and look a
with permission, mr speaker, i would like to make a seven on the northern ireland protocol. after weeks of negotiations, today we have made a decisive breakthrough. the windsor framework delivers free floating trade within the whole night kingdom. it protects northern ireland s place in our union and it safeguards sovereignty for the people of northern ireland. by achieving all this, it preserves the delicate balance inherent in the belfast good friday agreement. mr speaker, does what many said could not be done. removing thousands of pages of eu laws and making permanent weekly binding changes to the protocol treaty itself. that is the protocol treaty itself. that is the breakthrough we have made, those are the changes we will deliver, now is the time to move forward as one united kingdom. mr speaker, before i turn to the details, let us remind ourselves why this matters. it matters because at the heart of the belfast good friday agreement and the reason it has endured for a