The EU commission’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, has repeatedly tried to de-dramatise Brussels’ version of the Irish backstop, by focussing on the technicalities of proposed checks on goods moving between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. His efforts have not been entirely in vain, because this week David Green, who leads the Civitas think-tank, urged Leavers to support an Irish Sea border, so as not to “obstruct our march to freedom,” in an article for The Spectator.
Green’s attitude to the integrity of the United Kingdom is strikingly cavalier and he quotes Barnier extensively, accepting many of the EU’s most tendentious negotiating points. Though his reasoning is expressed more crudely, it echoes a previous Spectator leader that suggested it is “small minded” to reject the idea of EU customs officials operating in British ports and even Boris Johnson’s description of the Northern Irish “tail wagging the dog,” over Brexit.
It’s a sentiment that, if it is common, has stayed largely unspoken by Leavers so far but, were it adopted widely, it risks breaking up our own UK union, to make leaving the European Union quicker and easier.
When Brexiteers suggested that technology could be used to preserve a “seamless” border on the island of Ireland, Barnier dismissed their ideas airily as “magical thinking”. Now, he claims that technical solutions can keep goods moving freely across the Irish Sea. It’s not just the hypocrisy that is galling: he either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care that the practicalities of implementing checks were never the chief problem with the EU’s plan.
Barnier has moderated his provocative language around the backstop, but he maintains that Northern Ireland must remain part of the single market and the customs union, in the absence of a trade deal that ensures a soft land border. Effectively, the province would take its market rules and customs regime straight from Brussels, rather than Westminster.
If the backstop is implemented, the UK will have formally left the EU, so Northern Ireland will then have no input into the institutions that set its tariffs and draft its regulations. Meanwhile, its economy and politics will drift ever further from those of the rest of the country, where it sells the vast bulk of its goods.
Mr Green points out that there are already fundamental differences between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. The Belfast Agreement, for instance, is founded on the principle of consent, that allows a majority of voters there to determine the province’s constitutional future.
Actually, this arrangement is not so very different from Scotland, which, you may remember, held a referendum to decide whether it would maintain ties with Westminster. The assumption that the UK’s constituent nations have a right to determine their own futures now underpins our constitution. If there were swelling support for Welsh independence, it is likely that the government would grant a referendum there eventually.
There are specific problems with small-scale fuel and cigarette smuggling around the Irish frontier, but these tend to expose the shared nationalist delusion that there is currently no border. Attempts are already made to stop contraband moving freely, there is a VAT boundary, the Irish police stop buses to check for illegal immigrants and there are already security cameras at the border.
In any case, the volume of goods moving between Northern Ireland and the Republic is derisory in the context of the vast EU market. Given that larger consignments are unlikely to infringe any rules, because European importers are responsible for ensuring that the goods they import are ready for market, Brussels’ inflexibility is extraordinary.
The British constitution is a curious edifice, designed to accommodate anomalies and differences across our nations and regions. At essence, though, the UK is a unitary state, of which Northern Ireland is an integral part.
The Brexit referendum was held to take a nationwide decision. If Northern Ireland cannot leave the EU on the same terms as the rest of the UK, then its people enjoy only a second-class form of UK citizenship, that does not include rights to full participation in the politics, decision-making and economic life of the nation.
I doubt David Green will care about a fundamental principle like that. After all, he’s worried that 1.8 million pesky Northern Irish people will prevent 65 million UK citizens from enjoying a “Canada-style free trade agreement”. Perhaps he will fret more when Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP start to aggravate in earnest about the perceived privileges Northern Ireland might enjoy by effectively staying in the EU, while the rest of the country leaves.
Or perhaps advocates of selling out Northern Ireland do not care at all about the survival of the UK, which would be depressing for those of us who have argued that Brexit is something more than an outbreak of English nationalism.
Subscribe to REACTION
Iain Martin and the team make sense of the news, providing commentary and analysis on the stories that matter in politics, geopolitics, economics and culture.