(paywall) Veteran Leaver Booker: Despite Brexiteer wishful thinking, there is no easy way out of the Ireland impasse
Banished to the Torygraph back pages for Brexit heresy, allowed ever shorter pieces
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/03/despite-brexiteer-wishful-thinking-no-easy-way-ireland-impasse/
For more than 13 months, ever since Theresa May announced at Lancaster House
that she wanted to remove us from all the complex arrangements that allow us unfettered access to our largest export market,
one enormous question has loomed over the whole dismal story:
when would inescapable reality at last begin to break in on the endless sea of wishful thinking?
Last week, with the EU’s publication of its “draft treaty” for UK withdrawal, it did so.
For a year we have had little more than shadow boxing, with both sides simply talking past each other.
The EU has stolidly sat there repeating the rules of the club we have chosen to leave.
The British have seemed incapable of practical engagement at any point.
We have babbled about “frictionless borders”.
Mrs May has gone on about creating that “deep and special partnership”, and robotically repeating that we must “take back control of our laws, our borders and our money”, as if these assertions were themselves a substitute for thought.
But last week, with the publication of that 119-page “draft legal text”, the moment of truth at last arrived.
And what it all came down to, the make-or-break issue as I have been warning for more than a year, is
the wholly intractable question of the Irish border.
The seemingly ‘irresistible force’ of Brexiteer wishful thinking has at last met the immovable object of those EU rules
The EU again spells out, more formally than ever, that there is no way under its rules that we can retain that “frictionless” border between the two parts of Ireland,
because this could allow Northern Ireland to be used as a back door into the EU market by any country in the world.
The only way to protect the “integrity of the single market” would be to move that customs border into the middle of the Irish Sea,
leaving the two parts of Ireland united under the trading arrangements of the EU and
thus cutting Northern Ireland off from the rest of the United Kingdom.
The EU insists this is the only way its market can be protected.
Mrs May says this is “wholly unacceptable” and that no UK prime minister could agree to it.
So the seemingly “irresistible force” of Brexiteer wishful thinking has at last met the immovable object of those EU rules.
Of course, if we had chosen to leave the EU but remain in the wider European Economic Area, none of this crisis need have arisen.
But the result is that Mrs May has landed herself in an impasse from which there is now no way out.