Compromise needed to finally ‘fix’ boundary issue

Is it going to be possible for the UK to meet the commitment it made last year to avoid a hard border including any physical infrastructure or related checks? Britain, Ireland and the other EU member states are increasingly keen to see how this might be resolved.

Lars Karlsson’s Smart Border 2.0 report proposed one of the “fixes” but it is nothing like a DIY manual for the border.

The examples given (Norway/sweden or Us/canada) are far from seamless and frictionless boundaries. They entail plenty of physical infrastructure and manpower.

Another proposal has come from Shanker Singham of the Institute of Economic Affairs. His solution actually centres on a very narrow idea of what the challenge is. Singham has interpreted the UK’S commitment to avoid a hard border as meaning simply not have physical controls at the frontier line itself.

He claims inspections of businesses, warehouses and vehicles on small crossings behind the boundary can all be tools used by customs officials.

The genius of this approach, it seems, is that these would be behind the border rather than at it.

This only works as a solution for the Irish border issue if the priority literally is to avoid placing anything at the border that might be a target for violence. However, if the purpose of avoiding a hard border is about minimising interruption to cross-border trade it is certainly not an answer.

A customs border will bring barriers to trade. The problem with Karlsson and Singham’s “fixes” is they concentrate on the tools rather than the task in hand.

To use an analogy they are focusing on the software rather than the hardware. There is no software that can make up for the fundamental inadequacies of the hardware.

The choice of hardware, in this case, is: Free Trade Agreement, a customs union, or specific solutions for Northern Ireland.

The truth is that a Free Trade Agreement alone would bring with it the hard effects of a customs border on the island of Ireland.

Surely the time has come for a serious, transparent, evidencebased cost-benefit analysis of each of these options, recognising that each one will entail compromise.

This is a negotiation, after all.