‘Hard borders’ will make red tape even worse
Why, on Friday, was Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, snooping around the Northern Irish border – having previously been the first non-head of state or government ever to address both houses of the Irish parliament? The answer, of course, is that one of the three items at the top of Barnier’s agenda for the talks – along with the rights of EU citizens in the UK and that “divorce bill” – is the need to keep a “soft border” between Ireland and the North.
But Barnier knows that this is a massive conundrum. As he made clear to the Irish MPs, Britain’s decision to leave both the single market and the European Economic Area means that the UK automatically becomes what the EU calls “a third country”; which in turn means the re-imposing of “border controls”. Whatever problems this may create elsewhere in the EU, they are particularly acute in Ireland, because the two parts of that island, not least their economies, are so closely intermeshed.
For some idea of what this means, we could start by looking at the cross-border trade in what are called “products of animal origin”, accounting for a significant part of total trade on both sides of the border. These range from the 10,000 pigs and 1,000 cattle which cross the border each week in both directions, for slaughtering and processing, to the huge quantities of milk, cheese, butter and other dairy products which, also for processing, may cross the border up to five times before being sold.
All these movements, postBrexit, will become subject to EU Regulation 2016/429, laying down the five-stage requirements whereby any “third country” can export such
products into the EU market. First, it has to be designated by the European Commission as “an approved country”. Then, each individual business wishing to export has to be inspected and certified as an “approved establishment”. These procedures
alone could take months to complete.
Thirdly these “products”, including live animals, must be certified as compliant with the EU’s animal health requirements. Fourthly, they must then be accompanied by those certificates and other relevant
documentation. Fifthly they have to be inspected on arrival in the EU at a “Border Inspection Post”, which can take days. Only then can they finally be presented to customs controls for admission to the EU.
None of this of course applies to our
present borderless trade within the EU, which is one reason why so few businesses either in Britain or Ireland are yet aware of it. And not the least problem here is that, at present, there are only three EU Border Inspection Posts in Ireland: two in Dublin, the other at Shannon airport; which would mean tens of millions of pounds having to be spent on building and staffing new ones near the border for imports from Northern Ireland and the UK.
Ireland’s racing industry fears the implications of all this for trainers and breeders wishing to bring their horses back into the EU from Cheltenham or Newmarket. But other bureaucratic hurdles will await many other cross-border exports, such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals and all that vast range of products which require a “CE mark” (for Conformité Européene), which can only be granted by a “notified body” based in the EU.
The most public warning so far has come from the chief economist of the Irish Central Bank, who claimed that a “hard border” could in coming years cost “40,000 jobs” in southern Ireland alone.
Barnier may blithely hope that he can arrange some “special case” deal with the UK, to ensure a “soft border”, minimising all this bureaucracy. But here they could find they are falling foul of WTO rules which prohibit discrimination between “third countries”. And already we are hearing from EU politicians, such as Manfred Weber last week, the leader of the largest group in the European Parliament, that no such “cherry picking” can be allowed, because it might encourage other EU members to follow our lead by leaving as well.
One reason why so many of us voted to leave the EU was that we thought it could free us from the suffocating thickets of EU bureaucracy. We little realised that outside the EU we might find it even worse than when we were in. Have Mr Barnier and his UK counterparts actually read Regulation 2016/429? Are they really aware of what they are taking on? .