Ireland must not allow itself to be Brexiteers’ useful idiots By KEVIN O’ROURKE

Brexit hardliners have no interest in an Irish deal

IN recent weeks, the tone of the Government’s statements on Brexit has changed noticeably. For example, the Taoiseach has made it clear that there can be no purely technological solution to the border problem, contrary to what British politicians have frequently claimed. While some Tories and unionists have reached for the smelling salts in response to this statement of the obvious, I welcome the new tone wholeheartedly.

Life is too short to try to figure out what goes on inside the average Brexiteer’s head, but here is my best shot, as it relates to the border.

Economics is all about choices, and consequently I have very little time for people who don’t realise that if you eat a cake, you no longer have it.

But as we know, the Brexiteers have refused to admit that their country does, in fact, have real and important choices to make.

In particular, if they want to avoid costly customs inspections, they need to remain members of the Customs Union. (As soon as Ireland left the UK customs union in 1923, barriers immediately went up along the border.)

And if they want to avoid all the other border formalities and barriers to trade that existed before 1992, they have to be members of the Single Market. If they exit both the Customs Union and the Single Market, this will inevitably reintroduce frictions of various sorts, making trade with the EU more costly, and this will remain true even after a free trade agreement is negotiated. For the whole point of the Customs Union and Single Market was to do away with those frictions.

So they have a choice, and it seems as though they are choosing to make trade more costly between the UK and the rest of the EU – since they want to leave both the Customs Union and the Single Market. That will have a variety of negative consequences for the UK economy.

But to date, the UK government has been incapable of realising, or at least admitting publicly, that that is the choice they have made, since they are denying that you can’t have your cake (leave the Customs Union and Single Market) and eat it (preserve frictionless trade with the EU). Perhaps they sincerely believe this – a scary thought. Or perhaps they just don’t want to admit it publicly. Given the many lies told during the Brexit campaign, you can understand why.

And this is where they hope that Ireland can help them. They tell us they want to avoid a border, but what they really want is to leave the Single Market and Customs Union, and preserve frictionless trade with the EU. Which is impossible.

But some of them apparently think that by shedding crocodile tears about the border, they can achieve the impossible – by inducing the EU to turn a blind eye to smuggling (of, for example, American chlorinated chicken) across the border, thus undermining the EU customs regime and our consumer, environmental, and other safety standards.

And of course, once the nonsense that technology can ‘solve’ all border problems has been accepted in the Irish context, they hope this will serve as a precedent for trade with the rest of the EU. Indeed, David Davis, the UK’s Brexit Minister, has said he hopes the Irish border can be a ‘test border’ for the rest of the EU. But all that technology can do is lower (not eliminate) the Brexit-induced costs of legitimate UK-EU trade. It can’t stop illegitimate trade, which is why you need border controls. And so we occasionally read British politicians telling us the solution is going to involve a ‘light touch’ approach to smuggling, in effect ‘turning a blind eye’ to it.

Such suggestions are not only intellectually unserious, and unethical, as they amount to arguing that we should give a licence to organised crime to print money, but also politically naive. The UK is dealing with 27 other nations who aren’t going to allow their customs and regulatory standards be undermined, and their legal order upended, just to save the Brexiteers from the embarrassment that awaits them once the British public figures out that cake, once eaten, is gone.

And so I welcome the new tone coming from Merrion Street.

My best guess is that the hardline Brexiteers have never been interested in any special deal for Ireland per se, but that they have been hoping Ireland can serve as the key to unlocking a very special deal for the UK. A deal so special that it is impossible.

And I don’t think our country should let itself be used as the Brexiteers’ useful idiots.