evidence: Before his resignation in December 2021, the Brexit Minister Lord Frost proposed reforms to the Northern Ireland Protocol, which was where he felt most of the "current friction" between Britain and the EU stemmed. Whether or not attempting to renegotiate the deal was an attempt to "wind the clock back to arguments that were lost in 2019", as Peter Foster argued in the Financial Times, it is clear that the protocol as it stands is far from sufficient. Northern Ireland has been plunged into a political crisis after Stormont’s agriculture minister, Edwin Poots of the DUP, ordered a halt to Brexit checks on goods coming into Northern Ireland from Great Britain, reported the BBC. [...] The UK signed a trade deal with Australia in December 2021, the first negotiated from scratch since the UK left the EU, which the UK government said would "unlock £10.4 billion of additional trade". The UK has also signed new trade deals with Japan as well as an agreement with Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein.