What is the Backstop?

[HSarah]

I can't find a clear explanation of what this actually is- can anyone enlighten me? My family are all telling me different things.

You are right, they come out of very different histories but the impact of increasing resentment in Scotland may not be limited to the SNP. Unfortunately I can only see it increasing Scottish Nationalism.

Op, the backstop is chickens coming home to roost; the exposure of the biggest Leaver lie: that this was going to be easy.

While the majority of the bombings and punishment beatings in NI are much less frequent than during the troubles, before the Belfast agreement, they have not gone away completely. The motive for yesterday's fatal shooting has yet to be fully established.

The whole madness of a hard border in NI is that you have farms that straddle the border and roads that weave over it.

If a technological solution was already possible, don't you think it would be in use somewhere in the world? It would save a lot of delays at the customs borders between Norway and the EU, or Switzerland and the EU.

Yes, while other posters have covered the legal and political reasons why there can't be a hard border, it's also logistically close to impossible.

There are villages, farms and even homes that straddle the border. For those in the border regions, crossing it is just something they do as part of daily life - my MIL used to cross several times on her way to school.

Post Brexit, there will be more land crossings in and out of the EU on the NI/ROI border than on the entire Eastern edge of the EU. Policing each of these (which both Ireland and the UK would have to do under international WTO rules) is logistically impossible. In the past, the UK government blew up roads to reduce the number of crossings. Imagine suddenly finding your route to Tesco/school/work/mum's house had been blown up by the government!

... And now we're back to the GFA, and the legal and political reasons there can't be a border and the backstop is entirely necessary...

There is no hard border between Switzerland and the EU.

I think you'll find that goods don't just cross with no checks.

Maybe not lorries but cars barely raise a glance.

But the hard border thing is all about the goods. The WTO requires all trading areas to have control of their borders.
Please try and keep up.

Ursula, that's literally a hard border! In fact here's a couriers tweet showing the Swiss border.

twitter.com/donnyc1975/status/1069707437765222401?s=19

Incidentally, those tweet pics would be around Dover in the event of a no Brexit.

A hard border should affect all traffic.

Switzerland is part of the Schengen area and no passport controls are done on EU borders in the Schengen area. The UK wouldn't be after Brexit.

Not that the UK is just now. Isn't Ireland part of the CTA anyway?

Ireland is part of the CTA, but is not in Schengen so anyone arriving in the ROI from the rest of the EU is subject to passport checks, so no different to arriving in Dover. I believe the CTA would stay in place, it's the movement of goods rather than people across the border that is problematic.

Any customs infrastructure on the NI/ROI border, such as is in place on the Swiss border, would be politically unacceptable as well as unfeasible. Cars as well as lorries can be subject to random stops and passengers asked if they have anything to declare.

CTA doesn't apply to goods. Never has.
Only idiots think there is a simple solution.

It’s great that people are engaging and asking questions.

This is a really good explanation of where we are now brexitwise:

threadreaderapp.com/thread/1070439519269388288.html

Further clarification will, I’m sure, be provided by the very knowledgable posters found on these boards.

It’s great that people are engaging and asking questions.

Only 2 1/2 years after the referendum.

To understand the Backstop, you need to understand the basis of Good Friday Agreement. The GFA covers the relations between the UK, NI and the ROI. To implement it - there was a referendum in the ROI to change the constitution to allow citizens of NI the same rights as those in the ROI (eg - they can apply for an ROI passport). In NI the referendum was about support for the GFA. The key point to the GFA was the NI would be part of the UK until voted otherwise by the people of both NI and the ROI in a single referendum. And the people of NI can identify as either Irish or British or both as they choose.
The british government repealed the partition of NI - so it has its own devolved government. There is the free movment of people between NI and ROI. And there was the decommissioning of weapons and dismantling of the paramilitary organisations.
The GFA is an international treaty signed by the British government. Protecting it is the basis for the Backstop. The Backstop is a default position - that in the event that there is a failure to come up with a way to keep NI out of the EU while respecting the free movement of people and goods over the border between the ROI and NI, then NI will essentially remain the EU and the border will shift to the Irish sea.
The DUP do not want this. They do not support the GFA - they were the only major political party against it (along with Sinn Fein). They will never support an agreement that protects the GFA, and so they will never support the Backstop. It's not a case of bringing them around, or hoping they will see sense. It goes against their whole ideology and reason for being.
And of course, because of Mrs Mays unnecessary election last year, she needs the DUP - but she wont get them to support her Deal - as it protects the GFA. I don't see the EU removing this - they will support the GFA. The referendum in 1998 in ROI had 94% supporting the GFA, and in NI, it was 78% (the DUP and their supporters voted No).

There is a hard border between Switzerland and the EU - I live ten minutes from one! On the main motorway from France into Basel, there are separate lanes from the trucks - which are checked, and the cars - which are 'randomly' checked. My manager was 20 minutes late for a meeting with me yesterday as she was stuck in border checks.
On the cross-border trains, the border police get on to 'randomly' check passports, and on the cross-border buses, the border police wait and check people getting off (checks don't tend to happen so much on commuter trains/buses, it's more the long distance ones). Technically - there is no need for a passport check within the Schengen area (and Switzerland is within it) - but you ARE required to have identification paper on you in Switzerland. So a German ID card is fine in lieu of a passport - but these ARE checked. In practice the whole thing is pretty racist - if you look typically Western European you are rarely asked, if you don't you are asked much more often.
For the passage of goods - there can be queues of several hours for the trucks. Even people bringing shopping over the border can be shopped and fined if over the border limits.

So a German ID card is fine in lieu of a passport

The UK doesn't have ID cards. So that's an entirely new infrastructure that needs to be magicked up. Before the end of the WA (2 years). And we return to the entire Windrush conundrum again. The UK simply does not hold the information needed to issue ID cards.

Any route out of the EU requires something we can't do; or something we don't know, or something we don't have.

I wish we'd been told this before the referendum.

The GFA covers the relations between the UK, NI and the ROI. To implement it - there was a referendum in the ROI to change the constitution to allow citizens of NI the same rights as those in the ROI (eg - they can apply for an ROI passport)

Yes: People born in NI could apply for Irish citizenship prior to 1998, under the 1956 Nationality Act, but it wasn’t a constitutional right. I think that the 1998 referendum down south was seen as much more about Articles 2 & 3 (removing the territorial claim to Northern Ireland) than about constitutionally formalising a right to citizenship which already existed in legislation.

And Sinn Féin were not opposed to the GFA! They were/are massively in favour of it.

The UK got a massive concession from the Republic in return for scrapping the British border (because it only exists to British eyes) and that was the RoI removing the claim on the 6 counties from it's constitution and moving it into managed referendums on both sides.

That alone has saved the UK countless billions of pounds in reduced security expenditure. (It's also saved countless lives - but that wasn't the real aim).

Replace the border, you need to replace the expenditure. I did some calculations, and it comes out to be something like £350,000,000 a week.