The Irish problem
Thanks to her own incompetence, Theresa May now faces an impossible choice
JAMES FORSYTH
obvious solution — using technology — was
in effect ruled out. This is why the talks are
taking so long: every time the EU stalls, the
Prime Minister comes under more domestic
pressure and then offers more up to the EU.
At various points, Mrs May’s negotia-
tors have believed they were the clever ones,
that they could somehow use the Irish bor-
der issue to get the EU to agree to a special
deal for the whole of the UK. After all, what
could work on the Irish border could surely
be applied to the English Channel too. As late
as last month, the government believed
that it could pressure the EU to engage
with its Chequers plan, that would have
seen the UK effectively remain in the
single market for goods and preserve
several of the benefits of customs union
membership, on the basis that it was the
only approach that worked for the Irish
border. But despite positive sounds
from the Irish, this pleading had no
effect on Brussels — and was rejected,
in brutal form, by the European Council
President Donald Tusk in Salzburg.
Mrs May now stands embarrassing-
ly exposed. In December she signed up
to a plan saying that if the trade talks
failed, the UK would offer guarantees
on Northern Ireland. It would ‘maintain
full alignment with those rules of the
internal market and the customs union
which, now or in the future, support
North-South co-operation, the all-island
economy and the protection of the 1998
Agreement.’ What did this mean? At the
time, No. 10 told ministers it didn’t mean very
much: just making sure UK standards were
no lower than European ones. Don’t worry,
No. 10 insisted, it will all become clear in time.
But in one of the many inexplicable acts
of incompetence by the UK government dur-
ing this process, the government didn’t seek
to put its interpretation into writing. When
the EU produced its own legal definition, it
became clear that No. 10’s assurances had
been wrong. Mrs May had signed a document
agreeing that, in the event of no-deal, North-
ern Ireland would follow EU rules — even
if Britain did not. She had unwittingly given
herself a choice: soften Brexit beyond all rec-
ognition or abandon Ulster.
May was quick to declare that jettison-
ing Northern Ireland would be unacceptableT
he story of Britain and Ireland’s rela-
tionship has, all too often, been one
of mutual incomprehension: 1066
and All Thatand All Thatand All That summed up the view on this
side of St George’s Channel with the line
that ‘Every time the English tried to solve
the Irish question, the Irish changed the
question.’ But Theresa May’s problem right
now is that the Irish — and the European
Union — won’t change the question and the
only answers they’ll accept are unacceptable
to Mrs May and her cabinet.
To the astonishment of many, the
Irish border has become the defining
issue of Brexit. There is now a serious
and growing risk that the issue will lead
to the UK and the EU failing to reach
a withdrawal agreement — with all the
dire consequences that would entail.
It’s easy to see why the issue didn’t
receive the same attention during the
referendum campaign. The Irish bor-
der is 300-odd miles long with trade
of about £6 billion going across it; the
Dover-Calais trade is worth 20 times
that. But the problem is harder to solve
because the EU is saying that, while it is
prepared to wait to solve all the other
trade issues, it wants the Irish situation
resolved by the time Britain formally
leaves the EU in March.
The EU’s proposed solution is crude.
It wants to maintain frictionless trade
on the island of Ireland by, if it deems
necessary, imposing checks on trade
between Great Britain and Northern Ire-
land. It is a rhetorical trick to say that this
safeguards the Good Friday Agreement. This
EU plan violates the delicate balance struck
by Good Friday more than Brexit does. It
would ease Northern Ireland away from the
UK and push it more towards Dublin’s orbit.
Under the Barnier plan, if a Northern Irish
business objected to a proposed new regula-
tion, its best bet would be to lobby a member
of the Irish government. You don’t have to be
from the ‘Ulster Says No’ school of politics to
regard this threat to Northern Ireland’s status
as unreasonable, even provocative.
The EU has always had three conditions
for a Brexit deal. Britain must agree how
much it will pay in the future, even before we
know what we’ll be getting in exchange for
the money. Next, the EU wants to resolve the
rights of three million EU citizens already liv-
ing in the UK (which ought to be easy). The
final condition is Ireland. This bit never quite
made sense: how could Irish border arrange-
ments be finalised, without knowing what the
post-Brexit trading relationship would be?
But the EU wanted Ireland included to
show that this small member state wouldn’t
be hurt by its large neighbour leaving. As one
Secretary of State said to me recently, Brits
don’t quite appreciate how much the EU
regards itself not just as a postwar peace pact,but as a way of stopping small states being
pushed around by large ones. The Greeks
would be entitled to a wry smile at that.
More importantly, the EU also realised
that insisting on progress in Ireland could
tie Britain’s hands in the trade negotiations
to come. And if Britain had also signed away
the money in the withdrawal agreement —
which is the plan — Brussels would have
got the Brits to throw away their best cards
before the main negotiations even began.
They remain tantalisingly close to this goal.
In a post-election panic, Theresa May
went along with this bizarre sequencing of
the talks: agreeing money, agreeing Northern
Ireland, and then discussing everything else.
Worse, she accepted the argument that any
additional infrastructure at the border could
not be accepted for security reasons. So the