The border issue isn’t about Northern Ireland; it’s about keeping us in the EU

Mrs May is being outwitted by a European Commission which hides behind the Good Friday Agreement

On Tuesday, Theresa May said she was “cross” with Boris Johnson. “He wants to tear up our guarantee to the people of Northern Ireland,” she said. The Prime Minister was not challenged on this point. Knowing the limited appetite of a British, particularly an English, audience for discussion of Northern Ireland, the London media generally defer to politicians on the subject and scurry on to other topics. Yet her claim to be the defender of what she calls “our precious Union” is, given what she has so far negotiated, very strange.

Soon she will have to tell us that the United Kingdom will be forced, in effect, to stay in the customs union, which means that Brexit will not be accomplished. Northern Ireland will be the excuse by which Mrs May hopes to persuade Tory MPS who aren’t really paying attention that it is patriotic to support her plan. Thus will the Irish “backstop” become the Irish backstab. News reports from Brussels yesterday showed the final choreography beginning.

How did we get here? Early in the post-referendum story, the European Commission claimed that the 1998 Good Friday Agreement insists on no “hard” border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. In fact, the word “border” does not feature in the agreement and the EU appears only marginally. Brussels has no role in enforcing it.

By seizing the initiative, the Commission cleverly deflected attention. The need for more border activity after Brexit comes not from any demands by the UK, or the Republic, but from the EU. It wants to enforce its endless rules and, in the event of “no deal”, collect new tariffs. It pretends there is currently no border between North and South, when in fact there is, including several types of check (against smuggling because of different rates of VAT, for example).

Having gained this bogus moral advantage, Michel Barnier then demanded that the Irish “problem” be solved before the second stage of negotiations – the talks on postbrexit trade – could proceed. This was pre-emptive, since the Irish difficulties concern trade.

Mrs May unnecessarily conceded all of the above. No doubt ignorance, fluster and British officialdom’s longing to placate both Irish nationalism and Brussels imperialism all played their part.

Last December, desperate for a result after her unhappy general election, Mrs May accepted pure Republic of Ireland language. She undertook, in paragraph 49 of the Joint Progress Report, to a backstop (“in the absence of agreed solutions”): the UK “will maintain full alignment with those rules of the internal market and the customs union which, now or in the future, support North-south cooperation, the all-island economy, and the protection of the 1998 Agreement”. If the UK fully Brexited, Northern Ireland couldn’t. So much for “our precious Union”.

Luckily, someone noticed. Because of her electoral failure, Mrs May was (and is) dependent in Parliament on the votes of the Democratic Unionist Party. Arlene Foster, the DUP leader, protested at para 49. So Mrs May frantically cobbled together para 50, which says (contradicting para 49) that “no new regulatory barriers” would develop between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom. Northern Ireland would have “unfettered access” after Brexit both to the Republic and to the rest of the UK – an example of the “cakeism” which, in other circumstances, Brussels deplores. Therefore the United Kingdom as a whole could not depart from the EU internal market and customs union. On Mr Barnier’s orders, Mrs May flew to Brussels in the small hours and signed. As she flew, she was dutifully reported as winning the first step towards a deal. In reality, she was flying into a trap.

This March, the Commission hardened it all up. Its Ireland/ Northern Ireland Protocol of the EU Draft Withdrawal Agreement insisted that Northern Ireland must remain part of the Single Market and Customs Union. The EU thus sought to redraw the border in the Irish Sea – an amazing breach, by the way, of the Good Friday Agreement, and a break-up of this country.

Even our weak negotiators could not accept that; but, given what they had already ceded, they floundered. “Chequers”, with its weirdly complicated ideas about us collecting the EU’S tariffs, is their dismal remedy.

Over the summer, Mr Barnier was heard to speak of “de-dramatising” the Irish issue; but then, on the eve of Salzburg, he re-dramatised it. Chequers was contemptuously rejected and Mrs May was humiliated all over again. Now she believes (though she is not saying so publicly), that she will have to make further surrenders.

This week in Birmingham, she stopped using the word “Chequers” because, some said, of its unpopularity with Brexiteers. No, her main reason for dropping it is that she expects to end up with even less. Despite her explicit denials throughout, she has all but locked herself into an arrangement that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland will stay in the customs union. All hail a Philip Hammond Brexit, one that misses the key opportunity for global trade that Brexit offers. “Chequers minus”, instead of Boris’s “Canada plus plus plus”.

So when Mrs May says that Boris’s idea would “tear up our guarantee to the people of Northern Ireland”, she needs to say a bit more about hers. It is, in fact, her guarantee to all our people, both sides of the water, that we are not, really and truly, leaving the European Union. Kipling famously wrote, of Ulster in 1912: “We are the sacrifice”. With a perverse genius, Mrs May is inverting this. She is making the entire UK the sacrifice, pretending that Ulster is the reason. That is what Boris is objecting to.

Some people in the Republic are now nervous. The South has more to lose from a no-deal Brexit than we do. The Irish opposition leader, Micheál Martin, has attacked the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, for pushing too hard.

It is clear that technical solutions to border checks can be found, without “new infrastructure”, if people want to find them. (Suggestions have been expertly expounded by Professor Graham Gudgin at Policy Exchange.) It is Brussels that has “weaponised” the issue, digging up old antagonisms as the 50th anniversary of the Troubles arrives. The people of the Republic may have little love for the British Government and naturally resent the disturbance that Brexit is producing, but they surely do not want a full-scale confrontation when a modus vivendi is available. Does Mr Barnier not mind disturbing the peace? If I were an Irishman, I would beware his price

– an end to Ireland’s amazingly low rate of corporation tax.

I wonder what the record will eventually disclose about how British officials behaved in these negotiations. Very few of them believe in Brexit. Virtually all of them believe in the Good Friday Agreement. In March 1993, when the British government was trying to entice Sinn FEIN/IRA into talks, it sent a secret message. It said: “The final solution” (not ideal wording, given that phrase’s history) “is union [ie, of North and South]. It is going to happen anyway. The historical train determines that. We are committed to Europe. Unionists will have to change.”

Our officials refuse to admit that, thanks to the British people, the historical train is now travelling in a different direction. We are no longer committed to Europe, but they still are. So their failure in the negotiations is deliberate. It is they who will have to change.