Read Peter Foster's definitive overview of the Brexit talks so far
For longtime followers of the Brexit process it became clear at some point in late 2017 that there would be no magic bullets to solve the crisis. And if there was any lingering doubt on that score, then the EU’s polite rebuff of Boris Johnson’s new Brexit “plan” has surely dispelled it.
As I wrote in Prospect last month, Theresa May tried briefly to solve the central riddle of the Irish “trilemma”—but in the end slumped to the table defeated, opting instead to just park the entire UK in the customs union. So having rejected the May deal which prioritised an open Irish border over a hard Brexit, it should come as no surprise that Johnson—elected to the Tory Party leadership on a hard Brexit platform—has now chosen to prioritise Brexit over the border.
To recap, the Irish trilemma asked how the whole UK could leave the EU single market and customs union (which had obviated the need for borders in the first place) while simultaneously avoiding a hard border on the island of Ireland or in the Irish sea.
Johnson has now “solved” that trilemma by accepting its insolubility and conceding the need for a customs border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. Yet he doesn’t want to call the border a border, or even to acknowledge that—by definition—it will require checks and infrastructure that no one in Dublin or the Northern Ireland business and border communities wants to see.
Oddly, Johnson’s “solution” to avoiding a hard border is actually the creation of two borders—a light-touch customs border between NI and the Republic, and a full regulatory border between NI and GB. Depending on your point of view, that is either “splitting the difference” or, as one major Northern Irish trade group put it, the “worst of all worlds,” leaving NI facing friction on both its frontiers.
Downing Street now spins this to a domestic audience as a grand compromise, but to the EU it just looks like another attempt to square the political circle in Westminster (remember May’s Chequers “deal”) without serious regard to what is negotiable in Brussels.
There is nothing that has been said in the last three years—to David Cameron, Theresa May or Boris Johnson—that suggests the EU is prepared to compromise on the integrity of its single market or the long-term stability of the Irish peace process. Angela Merkel would not budge to give Cameron an opt-out from the free movement of people; nor to enable May to “finesse” the border question with her half-baked customs rebate plan. Why No 10 thinks the German chancellor would turn apostate, to enable Johnson to deliver a hard Brexit that risks destabilising a small fellow member state, is a complete mystery.
Not that this will stop Westminster from engaging in another round of dialogue with itself, totting up votes for a “deal” that has no chance of being agreed in Brussels. And when this plan founders, as it surely must without huge modifications, and an election—or a no-deal Brexit—ensues, then after the dust has settled, the same trilemma will present itself, with the same negotiating strictures on the other side.
At some point, if the UK actually wants to Brexit, it will have to make fact-based decisions on its future. The past history of these negotiations suggests that a Brexit deal that gives the UK a measure of legal and political autonomy (particularly over immigration policy) while preserving both industrial supply chains and the integrity of the United Kingdom will look perilously close to May’s deal.
That was a deal forged by gravity, not strategy. It was essentially what remained once the wishful thinking had been stripped away—and it (or something very like it) may yet be the middle road solution that, in the end, “Gets Brexit Done.”
By Peter Foster, Europe Editor, Daily Telegraph
