Hard border still possible, says Johnson
BRITAIN: Boris Johnson has suggested that Northern Ireland may have to accept enhanced border checks after Brexit, in a letter to British Prime Minister Theresa May that has been leaked.
The foreign secretary has suggested that ‘‘even if a hard border is reintroduced’’ in Ireland, it would not significantly affect trade across the United Kingdom’s land border with the European Union – an apparent reversal of his previous position.
Johnson said as recently as November that returning to a hard border was ‘‘unthink- able’’ and would be ‘‘economic and political madness’’.
His letter, which was written after May’s Brexit ‘‘war cabinet’’ discussed the border issue on February 7, was leaked ahead of a speech yesterday by Sir John Major in which the former prime minister warned against allowing Brexit to undermine the Good Friday Agreement.
May yesterday warned Brussels not to try to break up Britain, as the EU published a proposed Brexit withdrawal agreement that she said ‘‘threatens the constitutional integrity of the UK’’.
Ministers believe the EU is trying to force through a ‘‘land grab’’ with a plan to keep Northern Ireland inside a customs union that would effectively move the border to the Irish Sea.
Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) accused Brussels of an ‘‘absolutely intolerable interference in the internal affairs of the UK’’.
Johnson was earlier mocked after he compared the Irish border to moving in and out of the congestion charge zone in London.
Johnson said in his letter to May that it was ‘‘wrong to see the task as maintaining ‘no border’ ‘‘ in Ireland, because a border already existed, and that the government’s task would be to ‘‘stop this border becoming significantly harder’’.
He also wrote: ‘‘Even if a hard border is reintroduced, we would expect to see 95 per cent plus of goods pass the border [without] checks.’’
The 18-page letter was distributed among the 11 members of the cabinet’s Brexit subcommittee before they met last week at Chequers. A spokesman for Johnson said he had been trying to set out ‘‘how we could manage a border without infrastructure or related checks and controls’’ while protecting UK, Irish, Northern Irish and EU interests.
Lord Heseltine, a former trade secretary, described the letter as ‘‘the most remarkable revelation of duplicity’’.
Downing Street is gearing up for a fight with Brussels over its decision to omit from its proposed withdrawal agreement May’s two preferred options for solving the Irish border issue: through a future UK-EU trade deal, or via unique ‘‘technical solutions’’. It devotes five chapters to the ‘‘backstop’’ option of Northern Ireland retaining full regulatory alignment with the EU.
A third option is set out as a legally binding protocol in the draft agreement, which reflects the EU view that the Irish border issue can only be solved by Britain effectively staying in the customs union and single market.