Who's got a spare half hour ? It's very long (over MNs 15,000 character limit) 
www.thefullbrexit.com/flaw-in-the-crown
thefullbrexit.com
The Flaw in the Crown | The Full Brexit
45-57 minutes
“The British government has responsibilities on the island of Ireland and Brexit must recognize them.” These were the words of Ireland’s foreign minister, Simon Coveney, as he responded to yet another British proposal for the organisation of customs and regulatory checks on the Irish border. These checks will be required by the EU in the event that Britain leaves the EU without a trade deal. So far, the EU and the Irish government have been insisting that the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) means that Britain’s responsibilities include ensuring that there are no customs checks on the Irish border. The “backstop” arrangement is the result, and this has proved to be a critical obstacle to a Brexit deal.
Coveney is obviously correct that the British government has responsibilities on the island of Ireland. Under the terms of the GFA, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland retains legal sovereignty over the Six Counties of north-eastern Ireland. However, Coveney’s bald assertion overlooks the deeply paradoxical character of Britain’s responsibilities under the GFA. One paradox is that Britain is obliged to deny that it has ultimate responsibility for the territory. This contradictory constitutional arrangement is praised by its supporters as “constructive ambiguity”, but it has paralysing consequences for Northern Ireland, which may now spread to the rest of Britain. A further contradiction is that the UK state also has unambiguous responsibilities to the people of Great Britain and, following the referendum decision to leave the EU, these responsibilities come into conflict with the GFA.
Above all, Britain’s responsibility is to resolve these contradictions. It can do this by offering rather more than Dublin is asking for. The British people should get behind the reunification of Ireland in a single republic, and give Northern Ireland the chance to enjoy truly responsible government, an opportunity that has long been denied it.
There is rich irony in the fact that it should be the obscure political boundary that winds its way through the Irish countryside that has proved to be the most significant obstacle to Britain’s attempt to reassert its sovereignty by leaving the EU. For decades the existence of that border, and the enforcement of British sovereignty to its north, denied real self-determination to the Irish nation. In 1918, following their victory in a general election, Irish nationalists declared independence from Britain, then fought a War of Independence against Britain. That war only ended when the nationalist leadership agreed with the British government that the Empire could retain six counties of its oldest colony, in which a loyal majority could be gerrymandered. The partition of Ireland led to decades of instability and violence and, ever since, internationalists, democrats and socialists have agreed with Irish republicans that Ireland should be reunited in the cause of the self-determination of the Irish people.
That argument remains valid. The unity of Ireland is still a condition of the sovereignty of its people. However, the Brexit debacle is proving that the division of Ireland also amounts to a major weakness in the sovereignty of the British people. Brexit is a test of the sovereignty of the British state. The difficulty that the British state is experiencing in leaving the EU has exposed just how weak that sovereignty has become. Britain’s continuing rule in Northern Ireland is making a particularly significant contribution to that weakness. This should not surprise us, because British rule in Ireland has always entailed weak sovereignty.
Making a success of Brexit requires the end of the union with Northern Ireland precisely because Brexit is an assertion of the sovereignty of the British people. To see why this is so, let’s begin with the backstop and work back from there.
The Irish Backstop
The backstop is intended to guarantee that, in the event that the UK and the EU fail to agree a trade deal during the implementation period after the UK has formally left the EU, there will be no changes to existing arrangements on the Irish border unless both parties agree to them. For as long as it lasts, the backstop requires that the UK remain within the Customs Union for goods and that Northern Ireland effectively remains within the Single Market. The backstop would, therefore, give the EU an effective veto on whether or not the UK can leave the Customs Union and make its own trade deals, yet since Britain would have left the EU it would not have a say in EU trade policy. An alternative version keeps Northern Ireland alone in the Single Market and Customs Union, entailing a trade border within the “United” Kingdom.
The anxiety this generates among British Leavers is exacerbated by the EU’s refusal to consider a number of technological solutions to take customs and regulatory checks away from the border area that have been proposed by the British government. Technical experts have long argued that these solutions already exist and are used elsewhere, requiring nothing like the border posts and guards conjured up by talk of a “hard” border.[1] The EU’s rubbishing of these proposals, and its unwillingness or inability to compromise, raises the prospect that, in the absence of a trade deal, the UK would be in the Customs Union forever (see May’s Deal Threatens Popular Sovereignty: It’s Time for a Full Brexit).
The backstop remains the most significant obstacle to getting a Withdrawal Agreement that is acceptable to parliament. The backstop is far from the only problem with the Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement. However, more than any other part, the backstop made a mockery of Leavers’ central demand to “take back control”, as the referendum campaign slogan put it. Pro-Brexit MPs’ rejection of it has created the political impasse that Remainers have since exploited with a vigorous fear campaign over the idea of leaving the EU without a deal, which they now hope will allow them to block Brexit completely.
Last year, I co-authored two articles arguing that for the UK to leave the EU’s trading system would require the UK government to drop its agreement to the backstop and to exercise its sovereignty in Northern Ireland.[2] Even if this meant no more than some cameras and areas for spot checks near the border, the UK government would have to say to the EU that the UK electorate had decided that the UK was leaving, that Northern Ireland was part of the UK and that that was that. Our point, then, was that Brexit was a “test of sovereignty”. Whether we liked it or not, the people of Ireland North and South had voted for the GFA, and that had left legal sovereignty over the Six Counties with the UK. The UK had now decided to leave the EU. If the government was unable to drop the backstop, that would prove that the UK was not able to exercise its sovereignty – not politically capable of leaving the EU’s legal regime without the EU’s agreement.
(contd)