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28 February 2018updated 24 Jun 2021 12:25pm

Are Brexit talks heading for a serious crisis over the Irish border?

Ministers are nervously waiting to see what the European Union's proposed next steps are.

By Stephen Bush

Are the Brexit talks heading for a serious crisis? In Whitehall, ministers are nervously waiting to see what the European Union’s proposed next steps are. Driving much of the anxiety is the Irish border.

The word of the moment around Westminster as far as the UK, the EU and what was agreed at the end of the first phase of talks in December is “fudge”. But the truth is that what was agreed was not a fudge at all. The British government agreed that it would guarantee no return to physical infrastructure (or a “hard border” in other words) on the island of Ireland. There was an agreement that if any of the more absurd ideas floated by the shallower end of the Brexit elite – Zeppelins, blockchain, drones – are shown to work, they can be used in lieu of regulatory and customs alignment. But as that was always a fiction, the truth of what Theresa May agreed at the end of phase one was a sharply limited version of Brexit for the United Kingdom, as the internal politics of her own government prohibit any new barriers in the Irish Sea.

But now those guarantees are set to be written into law, with the EU27 expected to lay them out exactly later today, and the “fudge” (or rather, the perfectly clear position that some Leavers are pretending is fudge) will be over.

The simple trade-off is this: you can’t have significant customs and regulatory divergence and maintain the border between the United Kingdom and Ireland as it is. You can create a bespoke arrangement for Northern Ireland with a new set of barriers in the Irish Sea, you can have regulatory and customs alignment for the whole of the United Kingdom, or you have a hard border. That’s it.

Some pro-Leave politicians have realised this trade-off which is one reason why Boris Johnson made the argument for a harder border than the current one in a private latter to Theresa May (Sky’s Faisal Islam has got hold of a copy) at the end of the month.

What the Foreign Secretary recognises is that you cannot have “the benefits of Brexit” (parking for a moment whether you believe those benefits are illusory) and maintain the United Kingdom’s current policy position towards Northern Ireland. Something has to give. It may be the British government’s Brexit objectives, it may be the EU27’s willingness to guarantee an open border come what may, or it could be any prospect of a deal at all.

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