The Brexit silence is breaking

There has been a palpable change in the last week. Brexit is suddenly being more widely talked about again, and not just talked about but questioned and criticised. Despite having scarcely been mentioned in last week’s ‘budget’ statement or Labour’s response, it was that budget which was the spark, although the tinder was already there in the things set out in my post of 4 November.

Why is Brexit being talked about again?

In brief, I suggested that four factors were coming together.

First, the Liz Truss mini-budget had tested almost to destruction the theocratic Brexiter idea that belief could trump reality and the nationalist Brexiter idea that the UK was strong enough to buck what they call ‘the global Establishment’. At the same time, it made economic growth central to defining what Brexit was supposed to deliver.

Second, the disastrous collapse of the mini-budget and, with it, the Truss premiership, brought Rishi Sunak to power on the sole basis of his supposed economic competence and realism.

Third, this happened against a background where opinion polls show ‘the economy’ to be by far the biggest issue of concern to the public.

Fourth, it happened against the background of opinion polls which for many months have shown a growing majority for the view that Brexit was a mistake, and a majority view that Brexit has been economically damaging.

It was thus highly likely that once the delayed Budget statement occurred these things would coalesce around the question of how can the government claim to be economically competent and realistic, and how can it promote growth, if it does not address the economic damage of the unpopular policy of Brexit.

This is exactly what has happened this week, and it has been given added bite by a fifth factor, namely the way that George Eustice’s comments last week finally opened up for debate the inadequacy of the Brexiters’ sole claim to an economic benefit, that of making independent free trade agreements. With that has come a realization that Brexit Britain’s ‘trade honeymoon’ is over, though the red herring of CPTPP membership still lingers.

Although some media coverage talks as if the issue of Brexit has suddenly re-appeared, the truth is that it has never gone away, as anyone reading this blog regularly will know. Whilst media and political attention may have been much reduced, the reality is that neither leaving the EU, nor the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) that followed, provided a sustainable resolution to the Brexit debate.

The Brexiters’ political failure

That is partly because of the economic damage but, more fundamentally, because the Brexiters have totally failed to build a political consensus for Brexit. Even now, the only thing they can point to as the basis for such a consensus is the 2016 referendum result. But that narrow victory should have been only the beginning. If they had been serious about embedding Brexit as the new, accepted reality amongst a sustainable and growing majority of people they needed to show that it could work, and also to reach out to those who had opposed it.

Instead, they were not only unable to show it could work but, in many cases, actively decried what was being done as ‘not real Brexit’ whilst at the same time expecting those who had never believed in it to be persuaded to accept something they, themselves, were criticising. As for reaching out to opponents, they simply made no attempt at all. Only ‘true believers’ were regarded as having any right to shape Brexit, whilst remainers were treated with contempt. And so, quietly, and without much political leadership or media attention, opposition to Brexit has hardened amongst almost all of those who had always opposed it whilst the growing evidence of its failure reduced the number who supported it, with 20% of those who voted leave now regretting it. In short, the Brexiters won the referendum, but have failed to ‘seal the deal’ with the British people.

The aftermath of the budget

Now, in the aftermath of the budget, that is coming back to haunt them. Crucially, what is happening is not just a revival of ‘remainer’ criticisms. The pro-Brexit Telegraph is awash with articles bemoaning the “squandering” of Brexit (£) and of its “failure to deliver” benefits (£), to the point of recognizing that it might even be reversed. As for the Express, that other bastion of the true believers, it has recently gone remarkably quiet about Brexit. But, even there, an article by Tim Newark this week pronounced that, with the demise of Truss, “Tory MPs blew their one chance to re-commit to Brexit”.

Most strikingly, in an article in the Mail, veteran political journalist Andrew Neil wrote that “this is the week that Brexit died”. Neil has never declared how he voted in 2016, or whether he voted at all and, to be fair, his interviewing of Brexiters has generally been as robust as it has been of anti-Brexiters, although the tone of his writings does suggest a certain sympathy for Brexit. But, if anything, that gives an added authority to his remarks which, broadly, argue that leaving the EU was “supposed to create a post-Brexit, low-tax, low-regulation, free-wheeling economic environment” and has not done so.

It is not a new critique. The free-market right have been making it for at least a year. The difference now is that the Truss government, which vowed to deliver this version of Brexit, collapsed, and that the Sunak-Hunt budget shows, as Neil and Newark argue, that it will never be delivered. There is a deep flaw in this argument, of course, because neither this nor any other specific version of Brexit was ever proposed at the time of the referendum and nor was it at the 2019 General Election. What these right-wing ‘Singapore’ Brexiters tried to do was to use Brexit as a cover to deliver an agenda which no one was ever asked to vote on, and which it is unlikely a majority would have voted for had it been presented to them.

So, again, it shows the failure to build a political consensus, this time not just for ‘Brexit’ but for their version of Brexit, perhaps because they knew that no such consensus was attainable. In passing, I have never been convinced by the argument of some people who oppose Brexit that ‘low-tax, low-regulation Brexit’ was the ‘real agenda’ all along. Of course it was, by definition, the agenda of those many and powerful Brexiters who wanted that form of Brexit. But to say it was ‘the real agenda’ of Brexit is actually to concede to them the wholly dishonest idea that this was the true and necessary meaning of Brexit.

If one strand of the budget aftermath is right-wing Brexiters bemoaning that they will never get the extreme form of Brexit they wanted, the other strand is to re-open the question about whether the form of Brexit we have is too extreme. This was in evidence in the rumours that surfaced last weekend that the government was considering seeking a ‘Swiss-style Brexit’ for the relationship with the single market. Inevitably that also opens the door to the entire question of Brexit itself, especially given the polls showing clear public opposition to it.

Thus, to take a high-profile example, Piers Morgan – a remainer in 2016, but one who has hitherto been vociferous in arguing that Brexit should go ahead because of the vote – forcefully made the obvious point that “Brexit has been a disaster” and called for a referendum on re-joining. Arch-Brexiters like John Longworth may protest that “there should be no discussion now about EU membership” but to no avail. It is being discussed and it’s likely to go on being.

Back on the endless Brexit doom-loop?

Whether this revived discussion is a sign of moving forward is a moot point, however. The reports about moving to a ‘Swiss-style Brexit’ suggested that, even after all these years, quite basic things about Brexit are still not understood. Thus “senior government sources” apparently still believe that it would be possible to have Swiss-style Brexit without freedom of movement of people, and that the UK could get such a deal “because it is overwhelmingly in the business interests of both sides”. So here we are again, with the same old refusal to understand the single market and its inseparability from freedom of movement, and what is in effect a reprise of the ‘German car makers’ argument. It’s truly pathetic.

And that is even before considering that the Swiss model of multiple bi-lateral agreements with the EU is one that the EU itself regards as cumbersome and unworkable, would never be entertained with Switzerland were the relationship starting again now, and would not even be considered as a basis for EU-UK relations. Indeed, one of the core EU positions from the beginning was that the TCA would contain, in one architecture, the entirety of the post-Brexit arrangements, rather than making piecemeal deals. That certainly isn’t going to change now.

In any case, Sunak quickly disowned these reports (£), and he and Jeremy Hunt seem now to have the idea that post-Brexit barriers to trade can be reduced within the TCA framework. There is indeed some scope for that, although, at most, it is a limited scope, certainly not amounting to anything remotely like the “unfettered trade” Hunt has spoken of. That scope will be reduced to the point of non-existence (£) if, as he pledged this week, Sunak maintains the UK ‘red lines’ of refusing not only freedom of movement, but any role for the ECJ and any alignment with EU regulations. This also seems to bode ill for the ongoing Northern Ireland Protocol negotiations where, astonishingly, it is now reported that Steve Baker’s plan is to revisit the ‘sequencing’ row of the summer of 2017, which David Davis lost. So, once again, we seem to be going round in circles.

Needless to say, all this gave the hard Brexiters a fit of the vapours, with a 'new Tory civil war’ threatened and a revival of all the tired old talk of Brexit ‘betrayal’. In the process, there was a reminder of precisely the cultism with prevented them from building a consensus, with a “senior Tory backbencher” saying that “I and many of my colleagues have never regarded Rishi as a true Brexiteer”. Meanwhile, remain-voting Hunt was called on to “personally deny” the rumours, as a heretic might be called on to publicly recant. Outside the Tory Party, Nigel Farage made his habitual threat to ‘return to front-line politics’ if the government were to seek to ‘betray’ Brexit with a Swiss-style deal (he has apparently forgotten all the times he advocated such a model).

These reactions can also be seen as a re-hash of all the debates since 2016. They show that, even if Sunak is genuinely an ‘economic realist’ who can see the damage Brexit is causing, he, like any Tory leader, is hamstrung by the fanaticism of the Brexit Ultras in his party, a fanaticism which far from having been assuaged by Brexit has been inflamed by it. Equally, they show how, despite the idea that Brexit would kill off the external threat to the Tory Party from Farage, he continues to have the capacity to scare, and hence to control, it.

But this time is different

However, despite their familiarity, what is happening now is more than simply a re-run of old myths and old arguments. Before Britain left the EU, it was still possible for Brexiters to promise Brexit benefits and to decry ‘Project Fear’. Now, although they still try to do so, there is more than enough evidence to see the realities, especially the economic realities, of Brexit. That includes the evidence that the central premise of Brexit as regards trade – that increased trade barriers with the EU would be more than off-set by growing trade with non-EU countries – has been discredited.  

In short, Brexit is no longer hypothetical and that, in principle, makes a rational discussion of its economic consequences easier or, at least, ought to make an irrational discussion more difficult. That is made more so by the collapse of the Truss mini-budget because it so manifestly discredited the Brexiters’ claims that economic reality could be wished away, as the province of the ‘remainer Establishment’. Relatedly, the fact that the ‘intellectual’ basis of the mini-budget came from precisely the same group of economists who provided the economic case for Brexit itself has served to further undermine that case. Whenever their fantasies meet reality they fall apart.

And this extends beyond the purely economic frame. Especially as a result of the Ukraine war, the realities of the shared geo-political interests of the EU and the UK are more obvious. So, too, can it be seen that, far from ‘getting Brexit done’ with an ‘oven-ready deal’, the Northern Ireland issue that proved so central in the Brexit process has not, in fact been resolved. And since that is in large part because Brexiters have insisted that what was agreed and signed up to should not really be binding, then that undermines their equally loud insistence that every other aspect of the Brexit Boris Johnson agreed is, for all time, sacrosanct.

Moreover, before Britain left the EU, Brexiters could claim that they were seeking to ensure that ‘true Brexit’ was delivered. But, now, they are adamant that it has not been delivered. So often have they said that was we have got is ‘Brexit in name only’ (BRINO) that it takes away the force of their attempt to portray a softer Brexit than we currently have as BRINO. For if we really only have BRINO then why not have a different, less expensive BRINO? Or no Brexit at all? Or, to put it another way, if they insist that ‘Brexit has died’ because the ‘benefits’ (as they cast them) of a low-tax, low-regulation economy have been killed off, then the argument (in their terms) for undertaking Brexit has disappeared. So why not soften, or even reverse, it?

All of this means that the current, revived, Brexit debate is occurring against a different background to that of the pre-2020 debate. In one way, that background is worse for erstwhile remainers because, of course, there is no prospect of ‘remaining’, as sometimes seemed possible up until the result of the 2019 election. In another way, it is much worse for the Brexiters, because the very fact it is occurring is a sign of Brexit’s failure and, as the desperate tone of their attempts to ‘save’ Brexit shows, they know that it is a fragile and unpopular project. As if to provide a timely metaphor, this week Unboxed, the rebranded version of the Festival of Brexit, came to an end amid a welter of criticisms of it for being unpopular failure (£) and a waste of public money.

That unpopularity in turn means that the biggest battering-ram argument they used to constantly invoke, that Brexit is “the will of the people”, is now little more than a crumbling cudgel. Which people? The ones who, not just in the odd survey, but over and over again in every opinion poll say in a clear majority that Brexit was a mistake? Just for how long and how far can a referendum, the mandate of which has now been fully discharged, be used in defence of a version of Brexit that was not even the subject of that vote?

It all comes down to the Labour Party now

So in all these ways, something important is changing in the Brexit saga and that has become apparent this week. It is possible that the latest debate will all die down again, but that is unlikely because the underlying issues of the damage, especially the economic damage, of Brexit will persist. So, assuming economic performance continues to be the defining theme of Sunak’s government, then the debate will continue, and with it the daily new examples of Brexit’s failure and damage.

However, the unchanged dynamics of the Tory Party mean that Sunak will not be able to address, still less resolve, the problems of Brexit. There’s certainly little sign he can end the Northern Ireland Protocol row, because of those dynamics. It’s not even clear he will be able to stop adding to the damage, for example by dropping the EU Retained Law Bill, now widely recognized as being a recipe for administrative and business chaos but beloved by the Brexit Ultras in his party.

So if dealing with the damage of Brexit is to happen in any reasonable time-frame then it will fall to the Labour Party, assuming they win the next election. In any case, they can hardly stay mute as the Brexit debate revives. That makes it crucial, as pollster Peter Kellner argues, that Labour go into the next election with a clear policy to undo the worst of the economic damage of Brexit. It has to be clear, because otherwise they will not have a clear mandate if they win. And it needs to go well beyond the timidity, and vacuity, of ‘making Brexit work’ to some form of single market membership and a customs treaty.

In turn, that means breaking with its caution about immigration, the legacy not just of Brexit but of Gordon Brown’s ‘Mrs Duffy’ moment in 2010, and still in evidence this week in Keir Starmer’s comments about immigration at the CBI conference. In any case, the salience to the public of immigration as a political issue has steadily fallen from its peak in 2015, when 71% thought it was one of the top three most important issues facing the country, to as low as 14% in April 2020 and 22% at the beginning of October this year. It’s true that this has since risen to 37%, but that is almost certainly because the survey treats “immigration and asylum” as one issue which, for that matter, almost certainly makes all of the scores higher than they would be for ‘immigration’ alone. In short, Labour needs to be sure they are not fighting yesterday’s political battles on immigration.

As the staunchly Labour-supporting Associate Editor of the Mirror, Kevin Maguire, put it this week, Labour is “out of step with public opinion” on Brexit. I would put it more strongly than that. For once, Labour has a rare, perhaps generational, chance to stake out a position which is true to its values and those of its leader – for no one can seriously doubt, as they could of Corbyn, that Starmer thinks Brexit was a huge mistake – and which catches the tidal flow of the public mood, makes its economic policy credible, and is in the national interest. It’s a huge prize, if Labour can grab it.

Central to that happening is for this emergent new Brexit context to be fully understood and, in particular, for Labour to lose their apparent terror of being branded ‘enemies of the people’. That headline, with all the wider freight it carries, comes from 2016. Times have changed: Brexit has changed them. The people have changed: time and Brexit have changed them. The country and the world have changed: Brexit can change with them. But can Labour change? That remains to be seen but, right now, it is the only question that really matters.

Chequers agreement: medium Brexit?

The outcome of the Chequers summit has been to produce, really for the first time, the beginnings of a proposal that can at least be the basis of a serious negotiation. For this, it seems we must thank Olly Robbins in particular. Although the detail is to follow in a White Paper next week, the three-page summary published last night indicates a substantial softening of the hard Brexit approach that has held sway since the Lancaster House speech. It does not, as yet, represent a soft Brexit approach either: what we have is a proposal for what might be called ‘medium Brexit’. As such, for now, the cabinet have signed up to it, although hardcore Brexiters in the Tory Party don’t like it, and those outside the party, like Nigel Farage, loathe it.

As expected, a core part of the proposal is for Britain to stay in a goods-only single market but, significantly I think, it is not described in that way but as a UK-EU “free trade area for goods”. This wording is either a sop to the Brexiters or represents the continuation of what has long been one of their core misunderstandings, namely that a single market is the same a free trade area. This confusion, discussed in detail in my blog post of 20 February 2017 is, as I wrote there, evidenced by an interesting insider account of the referendum campaign, written by Daniel Korski, formerly Deputy Director of David Cameron’s Policy Unit. He records the frustration during the pre-referendum re-negotiation with the EU: 

“Nor would our counterparts in Europe acknowledge that the EU’s four freedoms are very much divisible. A country can reduce tariffs and remove trade barriers and still maintain restrictions on which foreigners are allowed to enter the country. This is what the United States has done since World War II, with NAFTA being the best example.”

Later in that post, I suggested that the government’s approach to Brexit at that time was to try to shoehorn together the two fundamentally different models of international trade, a single market and a free trade area. On the basis of the wording of the Chequers statement that is still the approach or, at least, Brexiters are being allowed to believe that it is. It also panders to the ‘country cousin’ of the single market/ free trade area confusion, namely the habitual canard that ‘when we joined, we were told it was just a trade area’.

However, in other respects, the Brexiters are being asked to swallow something which looks more like ‘Ukraine plus’ or ‘Switzerland plus’ i.e. a goods but not services single market; some kind of UK-EU institutional arrangement which might look rather similar to the EFTA Court, or to the kind of ECJ-backstopped arbitration system associated with the Ukraine DCFTA; and an as yet unspecified ‘mobility framework’ that would be more or less close to free movement of people as per Switzerland. In addition to all of this, and very much in addition to Swiss or Ukraine models, there is the proposal for a new ‘facilitated customs arrangement’.

Will the EU-27 agree to this? Ultimately, no, for the reasons set out in my previous post. But they will almost certainly take it seriously and negotiate seriously about it, if only because, as noted above, it is the first time Britain has produced a basis for such a serious negotiation. In the course of it, I would expect the court arrangement to land up pretty close to the EFTA court and the mobility framework to get pretty close to freedom of movement.

As for the customs arrangement proposal – this remains a mess and it is very hard to see how it can generate something workable and, if so, not any time soon. So that implies a much longer transition period than is presently envisaged. Perhaps more likely it morphs into a straightforward replication of the existing customs union. What is most significant here is that by committing to a single market for goods and a customs arrangement, the statement also commits to agreeing to the existing Northern Ireland backstop agreement from phase 1, if only by dint of the assumption that it will never be used. That, at least, removes what has been the biggest obstacle to progress since the publication of the draft Withdrawal Agreement text.

Clearly if this does become the direction of travel, and it is hard to see how May can not expect it to be, it may fracture the very fragile unity of the cabinet and might provoke rebellions within the Tory Party. The question is whether what happened yesterday was that the Brexiters crossed the Rubicon and will now swallow pretty much anything that comes, or not. One irony, which I noted as a possibility in my post on the recent Withdrawal Bill votes is that the Brexiters have engineered a situation whereby a ‘meaningful vote’ on Brexit terms will not happen. They may live to rue that.

If things develop in the way just outlined, it will become increasingly difficult to see what the case is for not remaining in the single market for services, of course. It certainly makes no sense in terms of British economic interests for reasons set out by Charlotte Moore in a recent incisive article on the politics.co.uk site. By implication, the government still expect mutual recognition agreements to do far more heavy lifting than can be asked of them. And there is very little mileage in having an independent trade policy for services given that free trade agreements rarely liberalise service trade to any depth (the implication to the contrary in the Chequers statement is wholly fanciful and, presumably, just a sop to Brexiters along with the reference to potentially joining TPP; for that matter, it’s hard to see how the Chequers proposals give much scope for free trade agreements in goods).

So perhaps the model then shifts towards ‘Norway plus’ (i.e. Norway plus customs arrangement). If so, another irony emerges: since most Brexiters have, since the Referendum, insisted that this would not be Brexit at all they would really have no convincing argument against simply abandoning Brexit altogether although (as always) the route and timing to that outcome remains unclear. In any case, to the extent that Chequers makes a soft Brexit more likely it may also reduce pressure to abandon Brexit in the face of a possible ‘no deal’ crash exit which, by contrast, is now less likely.

We’re not, of course, at anything like the point of knowing anything for sure yet. It is still perfectly possible that the Tory Party will implode into civil war over the Chequers position, or that for fear of that the government refuse to make the accommodations which might, conceivably, make something like this position fly in the negotiations with the EU.

The whole situation remains absurd, needless to say. None of this is remotely worth doing, and if it was worth doing it would have been better to have arrived at this proposal before embarking on Article 50. Still, yesterday was, by Brexit standards, slightly less absurd than usual.

 

Note: I’m aware that people who have signed up for email notifications of new posts are not receiving them. I’m afraid I have no idea why this is, or what if anything I can do about it.

Why Brexiters are flummoxed by the Irish border

In a recent post I mentioned in passing the absurdity of a government spokesperson saying it was unfair for the UK to be excluded from the City of Culture competition since Norway was not. The absurdity, of course, is that Norway is in the EEA and as such is eligible whereas the government have insisted that Brexit also means leaving the EEA.

I commented that it seemed as if despite the endless amount that has been said and written about Brexit discussion still seems to be going round in circles. What I had in mind was the way that throughout the Referendum campaign it was common for leavers to respond to arguments about the economic damage of Brexit by invoking Norway (or Switzerland) as a model. If challenged that this did not meet their desire to end free movement they would then invoke Canada as a model; and when challenged on the economic limitations of this would go back to talking about Norway.

This constant confusion or conflation of fundamentally different versions of what voting for Brexit meant is what gave rise to the still ongoing disputes about how Brexit should now be enacted. Thus many Brexiters still argue for their preferred ‘soft Brexit’ of staying in the single market, whilst many remainers have come to countenance this as the least-worst option. Nevertheless, one might have thought that since the Lancaster House speech which ruled out both single market and customs union membership the hard Brexiters, at least, would have ceased to muddy the waters by dropping references to Norway and Switzerland.

But they have not. As the issue of the Northern Ireland border belatedly comes centre stage all the obfuscations of the campaign have returned. Thus the Daily Mail journalist Andrew Pierce – and he is just a high profile example of many others saying the same thing – opined that the Norway-Sweden border is a model for a “frictionless” Ireland-Northern Ireland border, since Norway is not in the EU. Similarly, Labour Brexiter Kate Hoey has proposed Norway and Switzerland as models for the border.

The obvious point is that, albeit in different ways, both Norway and Switzerland participate in the single market and both are members of EFTA. This in itself considerably simplifies border issues because of regulatory harmonization*. Moreover, both are in the Schengen area, which simplifies passport issues. However, neither is within the customs union and what this means is that, in both cases, there are indeed customs posts and controls in place for goods traffic between each of those countries and the EU (in passing, another Brexiter canard, that there are no controls between the USA and Canada, is also untrue).

It is important to understand that this is inherent to what a customs union means and, therefore, to what leaving the EU customs union means. It is not a matter of (malevolent) choice on the part of the EU to initiate a border if the UK leaves – apart from anything else, it is a requirement of those WTO rules which in other contexts Brexiters are so keen on. Ironically, given that the UK making its own trade deals is so totemic for Brexiters they will find that it is impossible to make any such deals without being able to give the counterparty assurances about customs control, without which free trade agreements are, by definition, impossible. Moreover, customs control is about far more, and far more complex things, than the collection of duties. It is also about point of origin checks, standards conformity, quotas and a host of other, highly technical, matters. For detailed explanation, it’s worth looking at this excellent Institute for Government report (or, for the bare bones, just table 1 on page 9).

Much has been made of potential technological solutions to a hard border. Some of these are simply in the realms of fantasy, based on technologies that do not yet exist. And where they do exist they will require the UK quickly and successfully to deliver large and complex IT projects - which given experience in other areas looks optimistic – as well as equivalent systems being created on the EU side of the border, which is unlikely. Hence the Brexit Select Committee this week concluded that the possibility of a frictionless border is very low, although this did not stop one of the committee’s members, ultra Brexiter Jacob Rees-Mogg, using the almost daily platform the BBC gives him to claim that technology would provide the answer and that (of course) the EU was to blame anyway.

With all that said, it is true that new technologies as well as intelligence-led enforcement make it possible for custom controls to be quicker and easier than was the case in the past. But the extent to which the systems at other EU borders provide solutions for the Irish border is limited for two reasons. First, because the Irish border has an extremely dense and interconnected economy. There is six times as much goods traffic across it as across the Norway-Sweden border and, moreover, it is of a different type. Almost all Norway-Swedish traffic is one-time (i.e. goods going once across the border), but the Irish border cuts across supply chains so that many goods cross and re-cross the border several times. Secondly, because even to the extent that technology can make for quick and easy controls, on the Irish border any controls at all entail an enormous political sensitivity and are bound up with the detailed legal and political issues arising from the Good Friday Agreement.

All of my discussion here, in common with that of the current debate, is about goods traffic but there is also the issue of the movement of people. I have seen many reports suggesting that this is not an issue but I am not convinced that this is so. In particular, it is often said that the Common Travel Area (CTA)** which long precedes the EU makes passport controls on the Northern Ireland border irrelevant. But precisely because the CTA precedes the EU and in particular the single market, it does not really address the issue. Ireland is not in Schengen but it is in the single market, which means that people from anywhere in the EU can freely move to it.

So in the absence of passport controls at the Northern Ireland border they can therefore then move unimpeded into the UK. Of course if they do so they will be here illegally, but wasn’t one of the siren calls of Brexit the control of immigration in all its forms? This issue cannot be resolved by checks at the EU-26 border with Ireland, since any EU-26 citizen at that border will legally pass. I suspect that Brexit voters will react badly if they find that a passport-free border to Northern Ireland creates an easy route for illegal immigration.

What we are seeing in the Brexiter response to the Irish border issue is the familiar combination of denial and irony that characterises Brexiter thinking in general. On the one hand, there is a denial of the consequences of what they advocate. That goes right back to the referendum campaign when Boris Johnson and Theresa Villiers (then the Northern Ireland Secretary) told voters that Brexit would have no effect on the Northern Ireland border. On the other hand there is the irony that having campaigned so vociferously on the platform of ‘regaining control of our borders’ they rail against – indeed treat as a monstrous imposition by the EU – the fact that leaving the EU means border controls. 

*There are a lot of complexities here which would take far more than a blogpost to summarise. The debate about Brexit has tended to talk about ‘the single market’ and ‘the customs union’ as if these were two entities, homogenous in themselves and clearly differentiated from each other. They are not: each is complex and heterogenous, each interacts with the other, each has developed over time with multiple anomalies and weird legal byways. Neither is analogous to the ‘golf club’ metaphor that is often used. A better analogy might be with organic structures. In those terms, it has been remarked (I am not sure of the source) that Brexit is like an operation without anaesthetic to separate conjoined twins and hoping that the weaker one will live. The Irish border is analogous to the point where the twins’ heads meet.

**Note that the CTA has nothing whatsoever to do with customs controls on goods: these existed on the Northern Ireland border until after the creation of the single market.