British media churns out fact-free cheerleading on border

No substantive trade talks can happen until Britain addresses the thorny border element of Brexit negotiations, writes Colm McCarthy

IF you are out of work, grew up on a dairy farm and fancy a career in journalism, there could be an opening at the Daily Telegraph in London.

Last Monday, the paper revealed, courtesy of opinion columnist Juliet Samuel, that Northern Ireland’s exports of milk to the Republic wend their way southwards in churns, reassuring readers that ‘…the UK will not be putting up watchtowers to inspect milk churns’. On Thursday, her colleague Anna Isaac offered an even more colourful account of the dairy industry’s transport arrangements, explaining that ‘...cows are moved to Ireland to be milked, that milk is moved to Northern Ireland to be processed into cream and butter, and then sent back again to Ireland to be sold’. Ms Isaac’s insight appeared in the news section of a paper that, once upon a time, set the standard for news coverage in the British broadsheets.

Fact-free coverage in British newspapers, notably the Mail, Express, Telegraph and Sun, has fuelled Europhobia since the 1970s and is now cheerleading every blunder in the implementation of the referendum result.

The electorate chose on June 23, 2016, to depart the EU. The referendum posed a simple binary choice, Leave or Remain. People were never asked if they wished to depart the single market, the customs union was barely mentioned and several prominent Leave campaigners insisted that single market access could effortlessly be retained. Whether this was ignorance or conscious lying no longer matters: the referendum is over, both main political parties accept the result, the Article 50 notification has been dispatched and the UK will depart the European Union at the end of March 2019.

The Irish border impasse is not the electorate’s doing, it is the result of British government decisions taken since the referendum. It was clear from Theresa May’s speech to the Conservative Party conference in October 2016 that her government proposed to implement the referendum through a form of ‘hard Brexit’ and this became explicit, and has been reiterated ever since, in her speech at Lancaster House in January last. The UK government has chosen to exit from both the single market and customs union, in addition to exit from the EU.

Immediately after the Article 50 resignation letter at the end of March, the European Council identified three boxes to be ticked in the withdrawal agreement before trade talks can start, namely money, citizens’ rights and the Irish border. Had the UK chosen a damage-limiting Brexit, staying with the single market and customs union, only the first item would have arisen. Freedom of movement is a single market principle so citizens’ rights would have been retained and there would have been no border implications either.

The second and third items on the list promptly released by Council president Donald Tusk were included because of the hard Brexit chosen by Mrs May’s government. It now appears that the third, the Irish border, could delay further the commencement of substantive talks on the UK’s long-term relationship with the EU, unless adequate British assurances can be negotiated over the next few days. The line being spun from London is that the Irish Government’s insistence on dealing upfront with the border is unreasonable, and that it can better be addressed once the substantive trade talks get under way. But why then was it included by the Council in the (very short) list of preconditions?

The reason is straightforward: if the UK departs both single market and customs union, there will be a hard border. The substantive trade talks will be about a Canada-style free trade agreement, and accordingly about what form the hard border will take.

This understanding is shared by the House of Commons select committee which reported last Friday and should come as no surprise to anyone. That it appears to have done so reflects the slapdash approach to Brexit evident through the referendum campaign and in the period since.

On the money issue, the UK has more or less capitulated, the Council having declined Boris Johnson’s invitation to ‘go whistle’. On citizens’ rights, some continuing role for the European Court will doubtless be conceded. The concessions are coming thick and fast in other areas too: Britain has apparently decided to stay in the common aviation area and specifically in the European Aviation Safety Agency, which means more continuing jurisdiction for the European Court. This will preserve existing route rights for UK-Europe traffic and will spare the British public the prospect of beach holidays in the Outer Hebrides in the summer of 2019. With the red line on European Court jurisdiction breached, expect more sector-by-sector demands from British business for continuing alignment with the single market.

The Democratic Unionist Party have been making the reasonable point that barriers to trade with mainland Britain would be damaging for Northern Ireland. But they would be bad news for the Republic too: both parts of Ireland do more business with Britain than they do with one another.

The best outcome for Northern Ireland would be a UK decision to stay as close as possible to both the single market and customs union, also the best outcome for the Republic.

In lining up with the Brexiteer wing of the Tory party, the DUP is keeping some strange company. Last Thursday, Jacob Rees-Mogg, a backbench Tory MP and regular media performer for the ultraBrexiteer faction, told the BBC that exit from the customs union was attractive because it would deliver cheap food imports from outside the European Union. This means lower food safety standards but also curtains for much of Northern Ireland’s farm sector, as the DUP must surely appreciate.

The greatest obstacle to any kind of benign outcome for Ireland, north or south, is the Brexiteer conviction that exit from the customs union will permit lucrative new trade deals around the world.

How the British government came to be persuaded that hypothetical trade deals outside Europe could compensate for relegation to third-country status with the EU remains one of the great mysteries of the Brexit saga.

Yet another assessment of the economic impact of a hard Brexit was released last week by a group of economists at the University of Leuven in Belgium. They conclude, as have legions of others, that the long-run impact is unambiguously negative for the UK.

The EU-27 country most adversely affected is Ireland but there are negative effects for every single EU member. Whatever about alignment with the single market, the Brexiteer insistence on abandoning the EU’s common external tariff makes a hard border in Ireland almost impossible to avoid.

Craig Oliver was David Cameron’s communications chief at 10 Downing Street and has written a blow-by-blow account (Unleashing Demons, Hodder, and recently re-issued) of the years leading up to the referendum. He gives a comprehensive account of coverage in both print and broadcast media but remarkably he reports no discussion at all of the Irish border question, because there was none. The issue which could still delay the trade negotiations is not mentioned once, not a single paragraph in 400 pages. Nor does he report any expressions of political concern on either side during the referendum campaign. You reap what you sow.

‘Both parts of Ireland do more business with Britain than with one another’