The EU strongly backs Eire's insistence that there must be no future regulatory divergence between Eire and Ulster. This would allow continued free movement of goods across the border. Due to their geographical position, Eire does a lot of trade with Northern Ireland so a hard Brexit (and thus a hard border) would damage them far more than other EU countries.
What is not possible is to remove Northern Ireland from the single market while maintaining the current invisible border.
Vague suggestions of a technological border solution or even a 'non-border' don't address this issue, but then how do we answer it? The issue for Mrs May is that keeping Ulster aligned with the EU means regulatory divergence between them and the rest of the UK.
Retaining EU regulations just in Northern Ireland could be done - and similar special regulations are already in force there (for example, in the all-island electricity market). We negotiated something similar for Hong Kong. No doubt, however, the Brexiteer headbangers will cry 'betrayal' and Mrs May is too weak to stand against them.
Even worse, her sickly and divided government is shored up by the DUP who fear anything that would weaken their link with the mainland. The DUP has said that they will withdraw their support if Northern Ireland was made to mirror Eire's rules - rules set by the EU which would not be applied on the mainland. Without regulation harmonisation however there could not be a soft border.
Mrs May hopes that she can avoid stirring up trouble by not answering the question, putting it off until later in the negotiations. However Eire has threatened to block talks from moving on until this is sorted. Mrs May might risk calling their bluff, of course, as a no-deal Brexit would be at least half as bad for them as for us.
The Irish deal was always a fudge with much left undefined, and that is why it worked - everyone felt that they had options. Brexit is closing down those options.
No comments:
Post a Comment