Is the UK staring at a dark future?

Brexit day – March 29, 2019 – the HMS Buccaneer Britannia will set sail in search of the riches of the “Anglosphere.” But there is a hitch: Someone has forgotten to raise the anchor, which remains planted firmly in Ireland. This isn’t surprising. Of all the Euroskeptic Conservative politicians I know, not one has ever mentioned Northern Ireland, let alone the sovereign country to the south of it. The only thing on the Brexiteers’ minds is the quest for parliamentary sovereignty and liberation from the supranational “superstate” in Brussels.

This blinkered view may simply reflect ignorance. Even an erstwhile “Remainer” like Karen Bradley, the current Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, recently confessed that, “[…] when I started this job, I didn’t understand some of the deep-seated and deeprooted issues that there are in Northern Ireland.” In other words, until very recently, she has been incurious about one of the central issues of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British history. Conservative politicians who find themselves in such a position would do well to know that conflicts over the “Irish question” have resulted in more than 3,600 violent deaths. They might also benefit from knowing that successive Conservative prime ministers, from Edward Heath to Margaret Thatcher to John Major, struggled and failed to resolve the issue before it was put to rest by the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

In addition to military decommissioning, the Good Friday Agreement brought together antagonistic communities by mandating smooth trade between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, under the aegis of the EU customs union. The fact that 55.8% of Northern Irish voters backed “Remain” in the 2016 referendum partly reflects this astonishing achievement. Anyone with an ounce of foresight should have known that the status of Northern Ireland would become a stubborn conundrum at the center of the Brexit negotiations. In fact, the problem is so intractable that conspiracyminded Brexiteers now suspect EU negotiators of using it to delay or stymie Buccaneer Britannia’s glorious departure.

Ironically, many in the EU also think that a plot is afoot. The EU has long insisted that a legally binding divorce settlement must be concluded before there can be any discussion of future UK-EU relations. But now Britain is suspected of exploiting the Irish question to insinuate a detailed “political declaration” about future relations into the formal exit agreement.

The key problem is the so-called Irish backstop, which would prevent the establishment of a hard border between Northern

Ireland and the Republic of Ireland in the absence of a wider deal on the future of UKEU relations. In December 2017, all parties concurred that such a backstop was necessary to preserve the peace under the Good Friday Agreement. But there has been disagreement over the translation of this into legally binding language. Failing an agreement, “the territory of Northern Ireland would be part of the customs territory of the European Union.”

For its part, the UK government insisted that it can address the border issue by remaining in close alignment with EU customs rules and deploying customs-monitoring technologies that have yet to be invented – which is to say, by magic. Yet the Irish government has insisted that every detail of the backstop be nailed down and included in the legally binding withdrawal treaty.

But this preliminary agreement immediately posed a problem for May, whose majority in the House of Commons depends on ten Democratic Unionist MPs from Northern Ireland. The EU rejected British offers to remain temporarily in the customs union after Brexit, because that would allow the UK to enjoy the benefits of tariff-free trade without having to permit the free movement of EU citizens. On this occasion, the EU once again suspected the UK of using Northern Ireland as a Trojan horse. Emphasis has now shifted to how the entire UK can remain in the customs union, with the proviso that “one day” it might be able to escape. But the basic point remains: Predominantly English Brexiteers have given no serious thought to the Irish question, nor even to the likelihood that crashing out of the EU might take the UK back to the dark ages. Many of them would rather lose Northern Ireland and Scotland than forgo Brexit.

Instead, they have been busy constructing a fanciful world of limitless possibility, based on a national mythology featuring Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh, the British Raj, and standing “alone” in 1940. Psychologically, some of them seem to be reliving an imaginary war with our closest neighbors and trading partners. Most sensible people live in the present. And wherever one looks, from Trump’s trade wars to Russia and Moldova vowing to block Britain’s post-Brexit accession to the World Trade Organization, reality is ineluctably crushing Brexiteers’ fantasies of English importance. Project Syndicate.

Many politicians would rather lose Northern Ireland and Scotland than forgo Brexit