We have handed Brexit detonator to Barnier

THE Brexit negotiations are a humiliation. We look like a seven-stone weakling being comically bent out of shape by a 500lb gorilla. And the reason is simple: Northern Ireland, and the insanity of the socalled ‘backstop’.

We have opened ourselves to perpetual political blackmail. We have wrapped a suicide vest around the British constitution – and handed the detonator to Michel Barnier.

We have given him a jemmy with which Brussels can choose – at any time – to crack apart the Union between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. We have been so mad as to agree, last December, that if we can’t find ways of producing frictionless trade between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, then Northern Ireland must remain in the Customs Union and the Single Market: in other words, part of the EU. And that would mean a border down the Irish Sea.

That outcome is completely unacceptable, as the PM has said, to the majority in Northern Ireland and to the UK Government; and yet that is the threat – to the integrity of the UK – that we have allowed our partners to wield.

That is why Barnier seems so confident. That is why they are pushing us around. And we are now trying to sort it out, with a solution that is if anything even more pathetic.

We are now proposing our own version of the backstop: that if we can’t find ways of solving the Irish border problem, then the whole of the UK must remain in the Customs Union and Single Market.

As a so-called solution to that problem, we are putting forward the Chequers plan which keeps us subject to EU rules for goods, for food, in practice for trade, and much else besides.

Either means agreeing to take EU rules, with no say on those rules. It means exposing UK business to potentially hostile regulation over which we have no control. It means we can’t do any real free trade deals. It means we are a vassal state. So we have managed to reduce the great British Brexit to two appalling options: either we must divide the Union, or we must accept EU law forever.

You might suppose that the issue of frictionless trade in Ireland had been grossly inflated in order to keep us in the orbit of Brussels. And you might well be right.

But what I can say for sure is that there are far better technical solutions than either of these hopeless ‘backstop’ arrangements. Around the world, authorities are finding ways of abolishing frontier checks – and doing them elsewhere. Why is that so unthinkable

for Ireland? The Irish currently use their ports and airports to check only 1% of goods arriving from anywhere outside the EU, let alone the UK. We live in a world of smartphone apps and electronic forms. There is no need for any kind of friction at the border.

As Jon Thompson, the head of Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs, told the House of Commons: ‘We do not believe we require any infrastructure at the border between Northern Ireland and Ireland under any circumstances.’

He is right. The tragedy is that the British government has never consistently pushed for those projects to be developed, and that is because there has always been a secret agenda to keep the UK in the Customs Union and effectively in the Single Market.

In a weird, semi-masochistic way, we have created the means by which the EU can bully us. We have conspired in this threat to the Union. It is time to scrap the backstop, fix the borders for frictionless trade and get back to the open and dynamic approach outlined in Theresa May’s original Lancaster House speech – with a big Canada-style free-trade deal.

Otherwise, we should tell our friends they won’t get a penny.