Brexit and the border
Of all the puzzles facing Britain in its negotiations with the EU, the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic is perhaps the most intractable, said the FT. Somehow Theresa May has to assert British sovereignty while not disturbing the fragile Northern Ireland peace settlement. And that’s a really knotty problem, said Mary Dejevsky in The Independent. One reason that a majority (56%-44%) of the Northern Irish voted to remain is that “people on both sides of the sectarian divide saw EU membership as a kind of guarantee of the Good Friday agreement”. But now the very things that have brought relatively relaxed relations with the Irish Republic – the free movement of people and free trade across the border – are in jeopardy.
In its position paper on the border issue, May’s government seeks to resolve this conundrum by making the border invisible, said John Garry on The Conversation. It is at pains to emphasise there will be no physical infrastructure of any sort – no customs posts, no vehicle checks – to impede the thousands of people and trucks that cross the 310-mile border every day. And for good reason. As one Irish MP put it: once “you put up a number plate-recognition system, it gets attacked and taken down. You have to put it up again, but then you’ve got somebody with a gun minding it next time”. An unpoliced border is a lovely idea, said Fintan O’toole in the Irish Times: “It tells Irish people of all persuasions exactly what they want to hear.” But it’s delusional. Small businesses, says the position paper, will be exempt from all custom requirements. Really? Who gets to decide what “small” means? And big firms are to abide by “a charming honour system” in which they pay duty on their goods only after these have been shipped. Dream on. Nor is it just Dublin that’s sceptical, said Newton Emerson in The Irish News. British newspapers like the Daily Mail and the Metro are now howling that an unpoliced border will be a route for illegal immigration, becoming “the Brexit backdoor to Britain”.
These fears are based on ignorance, said Daniel Hannan in The Sunday Telegraph. Immigration control, for example, depends “on knowing who is in the country”, not on blocking entry to people. Today, Britain allows six-month visa-free entry to people from Nicaragua, let alone the Netherlands, so why would would-be illegal immigrants bother to fly via Dublin? As for customs checks, these no longer involve, as the doomsayers seem to think, the mustachioed officials of the 1970s. Most of our international trade is carried out by companies with AEO (Authorised Economic Operator) status that exempts them from custom procedures. Maybe so, said Robert Colvile on Capx, but the issue that truly worries the Eurocrats remains. They rightly fear that, post-brexit, there will inevitably be things on one side of the border that are cheaper or less strictly regulated than on the other. And that means vast arbitrage opportunities for shady people. “The likely price of Brexit is that criminal gangs – most of them descendants of terrorist factions – will have a lucrative new business in undermining whatever theoretical controls on the flow of goods and people the British and Irish put in place.”