The UK will not be putting up border watchtowers to inspect milk churns

The line between Northern Ireland and the Republic seems like a big problem. But it really shouldn’t be

There are few Brexit issues as tricky as the Irish border. Difficult as the issue is, however, there is an easy way to summarise the general British view: you create a border if you want to. The UK has no interest in doing so. This hasn’t gone down well in Dublin. Britain is being painted as an irresponsible dilettante with no plan for one of Brexit’s most controversial issues. The UK position paper outlines some vague “potential technical solutions” to the border issue, but our government also argues, with good reason, that it is quite pointless to discuss the Irish border before knowing much about how the general EU-UK relationship will work.

Unfortunately, this argument isn’t working. Ireland is now demanding that Northern Ireland be separated from the UK and kept inside the EU single market and customs union. That is a measure not just of Irish anger and EU dogma but of the failure of British diplomacy, which might have headed off this row. To move on from it, the UK should make two things clear: Britain will not be the one recreating Northern Ireland’s old, hated border, and the future of the six counties will be decided by their own people.

As borders go, the invisible line between Northern Ireland and the Republic is hardly the site of a great international trading bonanza. A third of the trade across it consists of live animals and food, of which a large portion is milk, trundling south, fresh out of cows’ udders, and back north after pasteurisation. In all, the value of Northern Ireland’s exports to Ireland amounted to about £3.6billion in 2015, just under 5 per cent of its total sales of goods and services and a quarter of the amount it sold to Great Britain.

It’s important to keep the scale of trade across the Irish border in mind because, although it is extremely important to all who live and farm around it, the data is a reminder that we are talking about a very, very small contributor to the economics of the EU single market. And yet the EU and Ireland seem determined to have a fight over this dangerous movement of tractors and cows.

The problem, as they see it, is that Northern Ireland will no longer be subject to EU rules after Brexit, meaning all of its exports will need to undergo EU inspection and tariffs, which inevitably requires a hard border. The only way to avoid this, they argue, is to keep Northern Ireland inside the EU single market and customs union, moving the hard border into Britain, at the Irish Sea.

Britain disagrees that a hard border is needed. The UK has suggested instead that large, cross-border businesses be subject to a “trusted traders” regime, which would allow inspections to take place on business premises, rather than at the border. For small traders, Britain’s suggestion is even more radical: they should simply be exempt from the demands of inspections and tariffs.

This is a pragmatic and humane approach. But the EU hates it and, more importantly, so does Ireland. Both Dublin and Brussels argue that not policing the border would destroy the legal integrity of the single market. The EU’S external borders are sacrosanct, they declare, and must be thoroughly policed.

There is something slightly surreal about this objection. The EU’S external borders are, as we have seen, rather porous. We are invited to believe that the single market’s integrity hinges on the inspection of milk cartons moving across the Irish border when the EU routinely allows thousands of undocumented people to enter its territory across the Mediterranean. This is, frankly, bonkers.

For the sake of argument, though, let’s take this concern seriously. If Britain goes on a huge deregulatory push following Brexit, after all, we might suddenly allow tonnes of American chlorinated chicken or genetically modified crops into our market. Leaving the border unpoliced in such circumstances could mean letting forbidden and, from an EU perspective, unsafe products flood into Ireland and the EU single market.

Ideally, of course, the UK and EU will eventually agree to cooperate and recognise each other’s agricultural regulatory standards going forwards. But that cannot be resolved yet.

In the meantime, Britain should make two things clear. The first is that, for its part, the UK will not be putting up watchtowers to inspect milk churns. We will, instead, continue to trust Irish and EU standards. If people’s ability to cross the border does not materially change, they are unlikely to feel stirred up into sectarian fury. Should any customs posts appear, they will be put there by Ireland, not the UK.

But the second part of the response must address the fact that, if Ireland did choose to start policing the border on its side, that could have a severe impact on certain Northern Irish farmers. Ultimately, therefore, it should be up to the people of Northern Ireland to decide whether to follow UK regulations and risk provoking Irish trade barriers, or whether they would rather just follow EU rules.

Fortunately, Northern Ireland already runs its own agricultural policy. There is no reason why its stance on GM crops could not be decided in Stormont, just as its stance on egg production currently is. When power-sharing is suspended, as now, the UK would continue its policy of avoiding irreversible and controversial decisions. And in the likely event that Britain does not go on a huge agricultural deregulation binge, these issues won’t arise.

Arch-unionists will object that this gives away too much by entrenching a special status for Northern Ireland within the UK. But the Good Friday Agreement itself bestowed special status upon the region. We should let its voters, not the Irish or British governments – and least of all the EU – chart their own course between Britain and Ireland after Brexit.

Ireland is flexing its negotiating muscle. Dublin clearly thinks that Britain can be railroaded into surrendering, calculating that the DUP, despite its objections, will not dare to trigger an election that might bring Jeremy Corbyn to power. But this is a dangerous game. If Dublin follows through on a threat to veto Brexit progress in December, all it will achieve is to increase the risk that Britain leaves the EU with no deal whatsoever. And the country that will suffer most from that, aside from the UK, is Ireland. All this in aid of policing the Irish milk market. It hardly seems worth it.