Tories demand UK becomes landlocked

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The issue with the Northern Ireland Protocol is, and has been from the outset, that two areas with different regulatory and customs regimes need to have a border between them to control smuggling and tax and customs evasion. It’s a simple enough concept, although one which the Brexiteers are still struggling to understand, largely because many of them actually favour tax evasion and smuggling. Buccaneering, aka piracy, is what they’ve openly admitted that they want.

But the issue doesn’t just apply to the question of Northern Ireland – it also applies to so-called freeports. Logically, there has to be a customs border between any freeport and its immediate hinterland because two different customs regimes apply; without controls over what passes across that border, goods imported tariff-free into a freeport can simply end up in the rest of the UK, potentially undercutting legitimately imported goods. The proposal from a group of Tories that the whole coastline of the UK should become a freeport thus effectively amounts to a demand that the rest of the UK should become an entirely landlocked customs area. The fact that they are proposing, effectively, not to police the border doesn’t mean it isn’t there, just that crimes such as tax evasion, money laundering, and smuggling become easier to commit. If one of the problems with the border between the Republic and the North is its length and the number of crossing points, just imagine the consequences of a border which maps the entire UK coastline, but a few miles inland.

There is certainly evidence that establishing a freeport promotes the development of industry and jobs within its area, but there is no hard evidence to suggest that that economic activity is extra, rather than merely relocated. From the perspective of a capitalist, who wouldn’t prefer to operate in an area where they pay less tax and are subject to fewer regulatory restraints? Whether it actually benefits the economy as a whole, as opposed to only those who can easily relocate their businesses, is another question entirely. The evidence and experience is not good, which is why the government of the day – a Tory government – closed down the UK’s freeports in 2012. There is no obvious evidence that the current crop of Tories have learned anything from the problems of the past, and every reason to believe that it’s a get-rich-quick scheme for those prepared to play fast and loose with the rules.

There is another parallel with the Northern Ireland Protocol here, though. Those who believe that it is possible to set up separate customs regimes within a territory without policing the borders can’t understand why the EU doesn’t see things in the same light. The EU believes that borders between customs areas should be controlled; the UK government considers such controls unnecessary. That’s how they want to implement their promise that the UK outside the EU would pursue a policy of global piracy, although they preferred the rather vaguer term ‘buccaneering’. Same thing, though. One man’s criminal is another man’s ‘entrepreneur’; it’s hard to see how that gap between perspectives can ever be bridged.

Which crisis is the most important?

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During the Cold War, the boundary across Germany between East and West was heavily policed on both sides, nowhere more so than in Berlin itself. Border police regularly detained people trying to cross into their respective zones. As far as I’m aware, though, only on one side of the border were people regularly shot for trying to get out rather than in. Most borders, and the policing of them, are about keeping people out; borders which have the equal objective of keeping people in are comparatively rare. They are generally associated with authoritarian regimes, fearful that – given the opportunity – their people would seek to move elsewhere en masse.

Listening to Patel and Johnson, it appears that they want the French to police their borders much as the East Germans used to do, ensuring not only that no-one can get in without permission, but also that no-one can leave without consent. One even has the impression that they wouldn’t mind a great deal if the French border police went further and emulated the East German practice of shooting people. They probably think it would win them votes, and they might, sadly, even be right about that. But it isn’t the way modern European states work. Most European states – a paranoid UK being the most obvious exception – have spent decades trying to improve freedom of movement and remove barriers, not erect them. French border controls – just like those in the UK, as it happens – are designed to prevent entry rather than exit. And whilst people smuggling is illegal in France, as it is in the UK, no-one should be at all surprised if the reality on the ground isn’t quite as simple as Patel says it is (very little is as she says it is). Not all the people are being smuggled, some desperate families are simply clubbing together to buy boats. There is, ultimately, nothing illegal about a group of people setting off in a boat from a French beach; adding British border force agents to those patrolling the beaches would do nothing to alter that, even if the suggestion were not a gross insult to France. Unlike the UK government, the French government still seems to have at least a vestigial grip on the idea of applying the rule of law rather than acting out of prejudice, malice and self-interest.

Last week, in the wake of a mass drowning which was inevitably going to happen at some point, the PM convened a crisis meeting of Cobra. It was, though, addressing the wrong crisis. Many of us would have thought that the real crisis here is the desperation (just how desperate does a parent have to be to take small children on such a perilous crossing?) of so many people fleeing war, oppression, hunger and poverty in search of a better life. For Johnson, the crisis is that the drownings aren’t acting as a sufficient deterrent, and that the extremists in his party, egged on by a vicious and callous media, are demanding further action to stop refugees from arriving on these shores, even if that means taking deliberate action, of dubious legality, which will lead to more deaths.

As Simon Jenkins pointed out last week, many of those seeking to come to the UK in dinghies have the training, skills and experience which the UK economy desperately needs. There is an obvious insanity about spending so much time and effort in turning away people who could be filling the gaps, simply in order to play to prejudice about ‘others’. It’s the result of a desire to gain and retain power by whipping up and then appealing to people’s darkest instincts, even if it means tanking the economy in the process. And that, perhaps, is the biggest crisis of all that we face: we have a government incapable of feeling, let alone displaying, empathy or humanity and no immediate way of changing it. Worse still, the English electorate is, apparently, happy to go along with this.

Drawing lines on maps

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A very, very long time ago, as far back as July 2020, a certain Jacob Rees-Mogg took great delight in mocking the suggestion from an SNP MP that there might be circumstances in which diverging pandemic policy led to a wish to close the Scottish border. Oh, how droll he was in his suggestion that the SNP wanted to demand documentation from people crossing what he saw as a wholly imaginary border between two districts or areas of the same country. And how the Tory MPs behind him laughed, or would have done had they not been banned from the chamber by social distancing rules. Virtual laughter counts, I suppose. “A border,” he said, “is something that you may stop people crossing”. “Even I,” he added, “am not suggesting that we make people from Gloucestershire present their passports before coming into Somerset.”

Not for the first time, events have made a fool of him. (Not that he needs events to do that; he generally manages to accomplish the same end rather well without them.) It turns out that governments can create borders anywhere they want to, even around what they see as ‘districts’ or ‘areas’. Who’d have thought it? The government of which he has somehow accidentally become a part has been forced to admit this week that it will be implementing border controls for entry into that well-known foreign country, Kent, and demanding that some people present proper documentation before being allowed to cross. In fairness, the Tory party has some form on the distinctiveness of Kent – I seem to remember a certain E. Heath stating that he fully understood Welsh and Scottish aspirations, speaking as “a man of Kent”. (Although, apparently, for true Kentish folk, there is a clear distinction between being a Man of Kent and a Kentish Man; perhaps there’s scope for a further border across the county as well?) I do hope that the SNP won’t attempt to make fun of Jake like he did of them. Revenge is a bad look; besides, he doesn’t really need their help at all.

Spotting the flaws

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There is a certain logic in the government’s position, in an attempt to justify its prevarication, that quarantining people makes more sense when people travel from an area with a high incidence of infection to an area with a low incidence than the other way round. It means, of course, that it would make more sense to quarantine British people travelling to almost any other country in the world than people travelling to Britain. I can just imagine the tabloid outrage at ‘Brits’ being so 'unfairly' treated.

The UK’s proposals for ‘quarantining’ people on arrival look like too little too late – and even now it will be another two weeks before they come into effect. It is one of life’s curious anomalies that the one country which absolutely had to leave the EU in order to control its borders was the outstanding example of not bothering to do so, whilst all those countries which, according to the Brexiteers, had no control of their borders because they’re part of the EU acted swiftly to close their own. It also looks like more of a belated political reaction to the clamour for closing the borders than a response driven by concern about the spread of the virus.

But it isn’t even a proper system of quarantine. If I understand the proposal correctly (and it’s always possible that the government will issue further ‘clarification’ as they invariably do with their half-baked proposals), people (well, some of them – the list of exceptions is growing) arriving in the UK will be obliged to give border officials an address where they will solemnly promise to stay for 14 days in self-isolation. After giving the address to the officials concerned, new arrivals – who may or may not have an adequate command of English or Welsh to understand the instructions they’ve been given – will then be free to leave the airport, railway station or port and travel by car, train, bus or taxi to the duly notified destination, mixing freely with the population at large en route. They will then be trusted to stay in isolation at that destination for two weeks. This will be ‘enforced’ by random spot checks which may or may not be undertaken by understaffed services which are already struggling with their current workload. No, they don't seem to have spotted the potential flaws yet for some reason.

Drawing lines in the right places

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One of the greatest achievements of the European project over the last 70 years has been the removal of visible borders over much of the continent.  The Schengen area doesn’t exactly match the EU (some EU countries are outside it, and some Schengen countries are outside the EU), but it would have undoubtedly been impossible without the existence of the EU and the single market.  It has shown that the absence of borders and border control does not, of itself, threaten the national identity of anyone.

There are others, though, who like borders and, for them, the stronger and more visible those borders are the better.  ‘Controlling our borders’ was one of the core Brexit messages – and that in a state which wasn’t part of Schengen and had never abolished border controls anyway. The reason that Brexiteers bang on about ‘controlling our own borders’ is that those borders define a demarcation line between ‘us’ and ‘them’, with an often unstated but nevertheless ever-present fear and distrust of ‘them’; and the more visible the border, the greater the degree of demarcation.  Part of my opposition to Brexit is precisely about rejecting that demarcation, that ‘othering’ of foreigners; in European terms, I consider myself to be at least as much a part of the ‘them’ as of the ‘us’, particularly given the narrow and exclusive way in which ‘us’ is often implicitly defined.

I’m uncomfortable with the way in which so many countries have responded to the pandemic by reinstituting border controls.  Movement controls I understand, but are state borders the right place to impose and police them?  In France, the virus seems to be spreading from east to west, and in Italy from north to south; closing the eastern and northern borders respectively look like drawing lines in the wrong places.  Choosing national or state boundaries is an easy option, but it may also be a lazy and sub-optimal option - the determinant of where any lines need to be drawn is the progress of the virus, not nationality.

Here in Wales, I have no argument with the restrictions on movement which have been imposed to respond to the covid-19 outbreak, and accept that there is a need for enforcement of those restrictions, even if I have some doubts about the details of that enforcement.  It follows that I entirely accept the need to stop people travelling to second homes, potentially bringing the virus from urban hotspots into rural areas lacking the resources to respond to any major outbreak.  I can understand why local people in the areas most affected are concerned about people travelling to them under current circumstances. They are right to be concerned. 

There is, though, something that makes me feel uncomfortable about some of the language and rhetoric involved, particularly when it translates into fear and distrust of the ‘other’.  Calls for the effective closure of the Wales-England border when the virus is already circulating both sides of that line look like another example of trying to draw a line in the wrong place. There are holiday home owners in Wales as well, who would be unaffected by any border closure – unless we move to close county (or even community?) borders as well. 

Logically and rationally, restricting movement makes sense and enforcing those restrictions is a natural concomitant.  Those are things which can be undone easily and quickly if and when the situation allows.  But dark human emotions such as fear and distrust of others, once expressed and experienced, are much harder to reverse. Control of movement doesn’t have to be the same thing as managing flows across a line on a map and the association between ‘control of movement’ and ‘enforcement of borders’ is a potentially dangerous one.  Effectively encouraging the idea that people on the other side of an arbitrary line are in some way ‘others’, even if done entirely unintentionally and with the very best of motives, may have undesirable longer-term implications. 

Invisible borders

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Some of the fantasists in the Conservative Party have, it seems, come up with a wizard wheeze to avoid a hard border across Ireland which, according to them, could be up and running within three years if work started now.  Given that work is not starting now, and that all government projects over-run, it might be available in about five to ten years’ time, I suppose.  The problem is that it does not, in fact, avoid the need for a hard border at all, it merely avoids the need for infrastructure on the border itself, by moving the effective border to farms and factories wherever they may be found.  Like all the so-called ‘alternative arrangements’, it confuses the issue of there being a border with that border being visible at a specific geographic location, as though it is the location of the border – rather than the obstacles it raises – which is the problem.

It gets worse.  Whilst the ‘plan’ does indeed propose a means of keeping the whole of Ireland in a single regime for many purposes, it does so by taking the Republic half-way out of the EU’s regulatory regime and putting it under the UK’s regime instead.  So, in the specific and oft-quoted case that the UK agrees to accept chlorinated chicken from the US, the ‘solution’ to preventing it going across an open border into EU territory in Ireland is that Ireland asks for and is granted an exemption from the EU’s rules on chlorinated chicken, and agrees to accept the same product itself.  In essence, it seeks to mitigate a border problem between the UK and the Republic by imposing a border of some sort between the Republic and the rest of the EU, because otherwise there is nothing to prevent Ireland becoming a back-door to the EU for non-compliant products.

The blithe, casual and arrogant assumption that this will ever be acceptable to either the EU or the Republic shows the extent to which the Anglo-British not-nationalists-at-all still don’t really understand the concept that Ireland is a sovereign state and not subject to the whims of its larger neighbour.  I’m not sure that they’ll ever get it.

More fantasy from the ERG

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Yesterday, the Brexit Tories finally produced their ‘plan’ for handling the Irish border after the UK leaves the single market and the customs union.  As I read it, there are four elements to the plan:

1.    There will be a hard border, but we’ll pretend that there isn’t by doing all the border checks somewhere that isn’t at the border at all.

2.    We will use technology which hasn’t yet been devised to control the border.

3.    The government in Dublin and the one in Belfast that doesn’t currently exist and to which the relevant powers have not been devolved will work together to come up with a more detailed plan.

4.    There shall be a good sprinkling of pixie dust, generously applied, to ensure that 1-3 above can work in practice.

Actually, I made up the fourth - which is a great pity because it’s just about the only thing that would make the other three into feasible propositions.  The only reason that this is being given any credibility at all is because of the strange notion that ‘balance’ requires fantasy to be treated as the equal of hard analysis.

The problem of borders

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The proposal by Michael Gove to ban the export of live animals for slaughter has provoked a range of reactions, but none of them seem to have touched on what is, to me, the most curious part in political terms.  It’s presented as being in the interests of animal welfare, and I can certainly see that it is better to slaughter animals for food as close as possible to the point of production rather than to transport them across large distances.  I don’t, though, understand why it makes a difference whether the animals are being transported for slaughter rather than for other purposes.  I can’t believe that the animals are aware of the difference between the two – it’s the transportation which causes any distress, not the purpose of that transportation.

But above all, it’s the distinction between ‘export’ and ‘internal’ transportation that I don’t understand.  Under his proposals, transporting animals from Kent to Pas-de-Calais would be unacceptable, but transporting the same animals from Aberdeen to Exeter would not.  In truth, the sheep really don’t know the difference – crossing an international border is to them a meaningless concept.  And that, rather than animal welfare, is the real point of this post.

International borders are an artificial, entirely human, construct.  For sure, they are important in terms of marking the difference between different regulatory regimes, and between the territories administered by different human authorities, but considering their impact on the degree of additional stress experienced by farmed animals when crossing them (i.e. zero) should help us to understand just how artificial these lines on maps are – and in the process, help us to understand the innate silliness of the ‘control our own borders’ nonsense of the Brexiteers.

It is a backward-looking form of nationalism which insists on the importance of these lines on a map and in controlling what crosses them; as an independentista, I don’t believe that policing lines on maps contributes anything to the degree of independence a country has.  What it does do is contribute to a sense of exceptionalism and apartness, a sense of ‘us’ and ‘others’.  Sheep don’t need that – why should humans?

The race to the bottom

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It is right that the government and opposition parties should be competing with each other to offer alternative views of the future.  But that doesn’t make it sensible for them to compete to see who can come up with the most inane ideas about borders and customs union.  In a tight race this week to see who could say the silliest thing on the issue, Corbyn’s claim that we could be part of a customs union in which the UK could set its own external tariffs was narrowly pipped by Johnson’s claim that the whole border issue is as simple as recording the registration numbers of vehicles crossing it.  Neither show much understanding of the question.

What the Government has failed to explain to the satisfaction of just about anyone so far is why it is so important that the UK should be able to negotiate its own trade deals rather than relying on the 60 or so trade deals which the EU already has in place and the new deals which it is already pursuing.  Why duplicate or compete with that, just to put a different flag on the agreement?  In fairness to Corbyn and Labour, as I understood what Corbyn and his supporters to be saying this week, the reason that they want to be able to do that is because they feel that the EU has been discriminatory against poorer countries in its current tariff structures.  If true, that’s a fair point, and a reasonable basis for seeking change.  The problem with Labour’s position is that they seem to believe that they can both stay within a single tariff regime with the rest of the EU and at the same time adjust the UK’s tariffs with the countries concerned.

If we use a few simple figures to illustrate the point, what they are arguing in essence is that their (new, improved, bespoke) customs union can impose a common external tariff of, say 20%, and that the UK can then negotiate separate deals to reduce that tariff to say 10% (or even 0%) for those poorer countries to help them to improve their economies.  In principle, that’s simple enough – provided that those imported goods then stay inside the UK and are not transported elsewhere with the customs union.  But the point of the customs union is that goods from one member state can flow freely to all the others.  How would one prevent goods from being imported to, say, Belfast with no tariff and then transported by lorry to Dublin where the common external tariff of 20% applies, without introducing the sort of hard border which Labour say their proposal is designed to obviate? 

The whole point of a customs union is that it allows goods to flow across the ‘internal’ borders of that union without requiring any tariffs; Labour’s proposal would seem to undermine that completely.  Their fraternal support for the poor whose goods are being shut out of the EU is well-intentioned but, assuming the truth of the claim, what is the best way of seeking change?  Is it by changing the EU’s trade policies to allow those poorer countries better trade access to the whole EU market of 500 million, or is it by negotiating UK specific deals which only allow access to the UK market of 60 million? 

Noting the registration details of vehicles crossing the border with no clue as to who or what is inside them was the even sillier response from the Foreign Secretary who seems not to comprehend the difference between a county border and an international one.  His proposal would certainly provide an electronic list of which vehicles are in the UK at any time and which are not.  But it would tell us nothing at all about who or what was in the vehicles.  Obviously ‘taking control of our borders’ is rather less important to him than he said it was.

Agreement and reality

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On Saturday, Jacob Rees-Mogg told the world, in all seriousness, that the civil servants who had prepared the document showing that all credible types of Brexit were likely to be be worse, in economic terms, than remaining in the EU, were guilty of ‘fiddling the figures’.  It’s a very serious accusation, but the only ‘evidence’ that he seems to have produced is that he disagrees with the answers.  Personally, I very much doubt whether they have fiddled any figures; but what they have done is to look at a limited range of potential scenarios.  Very specifically, they appear not to have looked at the government’s own preferred scenario – that is, of course, the one that the government have so far found it impossible to articulate.

Yesterday, the Home Secretary told us that the Cabinet was more united on Brexit than people outside understood.  They are, she claimed, completely united on ‘on the need for "frictionless trade", the ability to strike international trade deals and avoid a hard border in Ireland’.  I suspect that she’s right about the degree of unity around those simple objectives; if that’s the level of detail to which they’re working, getting agreement looks like an easy task.  I suspect that it would also be fairly easy to secure cross-party agreement and wide public support for a demand that all taxes be abolished and the NHS budget be doubled.  The question is not whether they can agree about the desirability of the objectives, but about how useful an agreement to demand the impossible is likely to be.

I’m certain that the civil servants could indeed produce a model for Brexit based on the assumption that the EU27 will allow frictionless trade on terms unavailable to members let alone to any other non-member.  And if they did produce such a model, there’s a good chance that it would show that such a scenario would be no worse than remaining a member, and maybe even better.  Even Rees-Mogg would probably be happy to brandish the figures.  But how meaningful would they be?  Making the numbers add up to a total which provides the ‘right’ answer doesn’t make those numbers useful or relevant.

The agreement which the Home Secretary is so sure can be achieved within the Cabinet is based on a convenient suspension of reality, just like her boss’ declaration this morning that we will both have a different customs regime to the EU and avoid having any sort of border with that part of the EU which happens to be to the west of us rather than the east or south.  But who needs reality, when fantasy is so much more comforting?

Accidentally cancelling Brexit?

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Unsurprisingly, the Brexit fanatics are taking their ire out on the Republic of Ireland over the issue of a border across the island.  For those who have never really understood, let alone accepted, the idea that the Republic is an independent state rather than still part of, or a vassal to, the UK, this is only to be expected.  It overlooks the fact, however, that there is a sense in which what is being presented as an ‘Irish problem’ is only the specific and obvious example of what is in fact a generic issue.  That issue is, as Ian Dunt puts it here, that a divergence of regulatory regimes means that “you need to check that goods and services are of the required regulatory standard, that the correct tariffs have been paid and that products originated where they say they have”.  It only looks like a specific ‘Irish’ problem because it’s only in Ireland that there is a land border between the EU and the UK.

The solution proposed by May, guaranteeing no regulatory divergence between the North and the Republic, is a neat solution to the specific, but it does nothing to resolve the generic.  It merely shifts the issue from a line drawn across an island to a line drawn in the sea – it is the Brexiteers’ desire to opt out of the EU regulatory regime which causes the problem, not the Irish Government.  The only thing surprising about the opposition of the DUP to anything which effectively puts the North outside the UK regulatory regime – which is the apparently inevitable consequence of what the proposed agreement said – is that it did, indeed, seem to come as a surprise to May.

The call from Scotland, Wales and London to be given the same deal as Northern Ireland makes eminent sense politically.  As Nicola Sturgeon put it, “If one part of UK can retain regulatory alignment with EU and effectively stay in the single market (which is the right solution for Northern Ireland) there is surely no good practical reason why others can’t.”  Whilst I wholly agree with the sentiment, I don’t agree with the bit about there being ‘no good practical reason’.  For the reasons referred to above, putting Wales or Scotland in a different regulatory regime from that operating in England requires borders between those countries; and doing the same for London requires a border around that city.  Theresa May – or any other UK Prime Minister – is not going to ‘solve’ the problem of the Irish border by creating three new borders within the island of Great Britain.

There was one phrase in the proposed agreement which has received scant attention, and that was that the continued regulatory alignment would happen only "in the absence of agreed solutions".  I’m sure that May thought that would be enough of a fudge to be able to move on to the next phase, during which she and her team still fondly believe that they can negotiate a deal which gives the UK all the advantages of, and access to, the single market without being a member.  If they could pull that off, then of course the deal that she almost agreed to yesterday would become irrelevant; there would be no need for a border at all.  It would probably signal the end of the single market and possibly the EU itself (why would anyone want to remain a member if they can get as good a deal outside?) and for that reason alone it won’t happen.

There is, though, one other way in which May could honour the agreement she so nearly made yesterday, and that is to retain regulatory alignment with the EU for the whole of the UK – to remain a member of the single market and the customs union, cancelling Brexit "in all but name".  Did she effectively, albeit accidentally, come close to committing to that yesterday?

Delusion and reality

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One of the problems from which the delusional often suffer is that the real world has a tendency to intervene, and can’t always simply be imagined away. For Brexiteers, the hard reality that they are not going to persuade anyone to give them any new concessions by threatening to simply renege on existing financial obligations has been a long time coming, but there does seem to be an inkling of progress towards a more realistic position.  It’s not agreed yet, of course, and we don’t yet know the final figure.  It will almost certainly be higher than the headline figure being quoted, but a bit of skilful negotiation on both sides might be enough to hide the final total in a plethora of rebates, discounts and conditional payments.

There has also been talk for a while about progress on protecting the rights of EU citizens.  If it weren’t for the innate dislike that some people seem to have of all foreigners, this should have been the easiest of all to resolve.  All they ever had to do was to extend the rights of UK citizens to match those of EU citizens.  Again, progress has been hindered by an unwillingness to give the citizens of the UK more rights.  I think it’s called ‘taking back control’.

That leaves the one that the UK imperialists always thought was going to be the easiest of all to settle, and that’s the question of the border with the Republic of Ireland.  There was never any rational basis for assuming that it would be easy, but a failure to understand that the republic is an independent state, with full membership rights of the EU, rather than some sort of vassal state of the UK has blinded them to the fact that the EU 27 were always going to be more likely to unite behind a loyal continuing member than to abandon that member's interests in pursuit of a deal with a troublesome departing member.  The treatment being meted out to Ireland by some sections of the press well displays the lingering imperialism and exceptionalism which has dogged the UK for generations.

In purely logical terms, I have some sympathy with the position adopted by Liam Fox, which is that the nature of the border required depends on the nature of the trade deal between the EU and the UK, and might therefore be better dealt with in phase 2.  Or rather, I would have more sympathy if the UK government had not, during phase 1, removed from the table all the practical options which would allow an open border to continue, demanding instead that the EU come up with a proposal to avoid the logical consequences of Brexit for the border.

The key word there is practical, and how it is interpreted.  It has long been clear that the real objective of the Brexiteer ideologues isn’t simply to remove the UK from the EU, it is to abolish the EU and replace it with a purely economic relationship based entirely on trade.  How else can anyone interpret the demand for a trade agreement as good – or better – that the one we have, but without membership of the single market or the customs union?  Now if somebody believes – as I suspect that Fox does – that Brexit is just the first step towards that goal, and that the UK crashing out with no agreement on a future relationship will help to bring that about, then the position being adopted actually makes some sort of sense.  But to repeat the opening line, one of the problems from which the delusional often suffer is that the real world has a tendency to intervene, and can’t always simply be imagined away.

Intransigence and flexibility

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The position taken by the UK Government – that Brexit cannot be allowed to create an ‘internal’ border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK - is an entirely reasonable one for any government to take.  Even if it were not so, the reliance of the current administration on the votes of the DUP requires no movement on that question.

The desire of the same government to do nothing which unpicks the Irish peace process is an equally reasonable and sensible one; no-one in their right mind (although whether that’s a fair expectation of May and crew is a separate question) would wish to endanger the progress which has been made.  So avoiding a hard border across Ireland is an imperative for them.

And, given some of the wilder promises made by Brexiteers about freedom and independence, it’s understandable that ‘Brexit means Brexit’ requires departure from the single market and the customs union.

The problem for the UK Government is that the three positions - all in themselves reasonable and logical outcomes of the vote last year – are not concurrently achievable.  They can have any two of them, but will have to yield on the third.  It’s clearly an unpalatable choice, but it will have to be made.  Their position to date seems to consist of demanding that ‘someone else’ (i.e. the EU27) comes up with an imaginative solution of the type that they are themselves unable to either imagine or articulate, and that the other side’s unwillingness to do what they can't do themselves amounts to bully-boy tactics.  The default position - increasingly likely given the lack of any serious attempt to do otherwise – is a hard border across Ireland.  Like so much else of the 'negotiating' attempts of the UK, it's as though they are working in a vacuum, in a way which isn't going to impact on real people.

Coming back to bite them

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One of the problems with simplistic political slogans is that turning them into reality never quite matches the image that those targeted by the slogans took them to mean in the first place.  One obvious example, in relation to Brexit, was “control of our borders”.  It is increasingly obvious that what many of those demanding this outcome meant was control of other people coming into the UK; they certainly didn’t intend it to be reciprocal.  Hence the outrage being increasingly expressed by the tabloids about delays to holidaymakers entering other countries.

People who have, for years, demanded a tightening of border controls are now complaining bitterly about the delays which result from more stringent checks of passports and other entry documents.  But what does "controlling the borders” mean if not paying more attention to who is entering a country and whether they are who they claim to be?  It could be, of course, that what they really intended was for more people to be employed to man the borders.  Perhaps it was all a giant job creation scheme for the border agency.  That might be a bit more credible if the same tabloids hadn’t also spent years complaining about the ‘bloated public sector’.

Personally, I suspect that it is related to the long-standing tradition of British exceptionalism.  It’s not ‘freedom of movement’ that they want to stop, it’s other people’s - foreigners’ – freedom of movement.  The traditional blue British passport which they think they’re going to be getting back always asserted, as I recall, the demand of ‘Her Britannic Majesty’ that the holder should be allowed through without let or hindrance.  For some strange reason, however, those strange foreigners don’t see things in the same way – they actually have the nerve to think that UK subjects should be treated the same way as everyone else.  Inevitably, this clear and logical outcome of Brexit will be portrayed as yet another example of Brussels punishing the UK.  Of course.

The problems are all somebody else's

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Amongst the many problems which the Brexiteers never really thought through is the question of the arrangements for the border between the UK and the Irish republic.  If the UK were willing to consider remaining in the single market and customs union, then the problem would be greatly diminished, but given the outright refusal of both the government and most of the main opposition party even to consider such an option, the issue could end up becoming one of the major obstacles to progress.

Initially, some in the UK Government seemed to be suggesting that the Irish Republic could carry out UK border checks in its ports and airports, seemingly insensitive to the way in which treating the Republic as being somehow ‘part of the UK’ for customs purposes would be received by an independent state.  Subsequently the UK Government has suggested some sort of ‘hi-tech’ land border across Ireland, a suggestion which has not gone down well in Dublin, which sees any reintroduction of a land border as being in danger of re-opening past divisions and damaging both parts of the island.  Their response has been to propose that the Irish Sea should become the border.

Unsurprisingly, the idea of imposing customs and passport checks between one part of the UK and another (effectively treating the north as part of the Republic for customs purposes) has not gone down terribly well with the DUP in the north of Ireland.  One of their responses has been to suggest that there are only two options – there will either be a hard land border, or the Republic will have to follow the UK out of the EU.  As an exercise in cold logic, it’s hard to fault that, although as an understanding of political reality it fails miserably, and would lead inexorably to the imposition of a hard border. 

But it also underscores the underlying attitude of many Brexiteers from the outset on two points in particular.  The first is that Brexit only ever made any sense at all as a precursor to breaking up the EU, and the second is that the problems caused by Brexit are somebody else’s – in this case, the Republic of Ireland.  It’s another example of the UK’s sense of entitlement and exceptionalism that the problems should all be resolved by others bending down before the might of Britannia.  

Changing positions

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In March 2014, prior to the Scottish independence referendum, the then Home Secretary, Theresa May, said very clearly that if an independent Scotland and Greater England were to follow different policies on immigration, then border controls between England and Scotland would be inevitable.

Two days before the referendum on membership of the EU, the same Home Secretary pronounced with absolute certainty that border controls between the north of Ireland and the Republic would be ‘inevitable’ if the UK voted to leave.

Two weeks after becoming Prime Minister, she visited the north of Ireland and announced that border controls will definitely not be introduced.

What can we conclude from this (other than that her position on any issue is more likely to be based on the need for short term political advantage rather than any principle or strategy)?

The BBC’s reality check web site says that the truth about borders probably comes down to the detail of the terms under which the UK leaves the EU.  I’m prepared to accept that that’s a reasonable conclusion.  But since those terms are not yet known, we can only conclude that the latest statement from the PM can only have the same degree of credibility as the previous two – i.e. not very much at all.

At present, I can see no way in which there can be free movement between Ireland and the rest of the EU, free movement within the Common Travel Area between Ireland and the UK, and no free movement between the UK and the rest of the EU.  Going via Ireland might be the long way round from Paris or Berlin, but it looks like an easy passage.

Of course, if the negotiations result in continued free movement between the UK and the EU, the question doesn’t arise.  A lot of the ‘leavers’ might then feel that they’ve not gained very much though.

Opening the borders

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Labour’s Shadow Chancellor has been strongly attacked by his own side for suggesting that the world is moving inexorably towards open borders.  It’s another sad reflection, considering the internationalist idealism of the founders of the Labour Party, that those arguing for open borders are regarded as aberrant, whilst those arguing for controls over the free movement of people are regarded as mainstream.  It’s perfectly possible, of course, that those supporting strong borders are merely reflecting what they see as being the opinion of the electorate – but that’s an even sadder reflection on the state of the modern Labour Party and how far it has strayed from its early ideals.  And pandering to conventional opinion rather than being willing to challenge it serves only to strengthen it.

In the circumstances, suggesting that open borders are the way of the future was a brave statement by John McDonnell.  I think he’s actually right.  The world is changing around us in ways which not everyone will like; but not liking something doesn’t mean it won’t happen.  In particular, modern communications technology makes it easier for people to compare and contrast their own way of life with that elsewhere.  It’s too easy to see the refugee crisis as a product of war or famine alone.  Whilst those are certainly factors, concentrating too heavily on those ignores the wider economic issues leading to large scale migration.

‘Economic migrants’, as governments like to refer to them, are ‘merely’ escaping poverty, rather than death through famine or war; but poverty causes death too.  It can be slower and less dramatic, but poverty – even relative poverty – affects longevity as well.  And there can be no doubting the disparity in the quality of life between the rich countries and the poor.  It is surely entirely understandable that people seeing a better quality of life elsewhere will attempt to seek it out, rather than accept their current state.

Of course, whilst modern communications make the disparities more visible, and the comparative ease of travel (compared to the situation just a few decades ago) facilitates greater mobility, neither of those is the underlying cause of the disparity.  That comes down to centuries of differential rates of economic development; and we should never forget that the greater pace of development in the richer parts of the world was for a very long time underpinned by exploiting the resources of the rest.  The whole history of colonialism and capitalism is about the transfer of wealth from some areas to others.  In this case, I’m talking about the richer and poorer countries across the world, but similar processes have also operated internally within the richer countries.

Add in the likely effects of a changing climate, and we are going to see even more mass migration in the future, and people ignoring borders in the process.  There are two potential responses to the situation.  The first is the stance taken by conventional politicians, which is all about building fences and obstacles, pulling up the drawbridge as it were, to stop people moving around.  That’s proving hard enough now.  If the numbers continue to grow, it is likely to become unsustainable without resorting to the increasing use of force.  The other is the stance taken by McDonnell, which is that we need to start thinking about the consequences and how we prepare for them.

It’s not an easy or a comfortable question to be asking ourselves.  How do we protect and sustain accepted cultures and customs if the population demographic is changing?  How do we deal with the economic and social consequences?  Being afraid, for whatever reason, to even ask such questions is part of the problem, but the result – trying to pretend that we can continue to hoard wealth in some parts of the world whilst denying it to others – simply won’t work for very long.  If the critics of McDonnell succeed in silencing debate on the question, we’ll all be the losers in the longer term.

Looking for needles in haystacks

Tweet One of the more inevitable responses to terrorist attacks has been to talk about reintroducing border controls.  It is, it has been said, too easy for determined people to obtain weapons in one part of the EU and travel across the whole of Europe without ever being challenged, whereas with border controls, there would be more chance of stopping people sooner.  It’s a viewpoint which is not without a degree of logic, but it is far too simplistic, and I suspect that it hides a rather different motivation.

It is, of course, true that the shorter the distance between borders and checkpoints, the harder it would become for people to carry weapons and explosives from one end of the continent to the other.  But it is equally true that having border checks on every county boundary – or even every parish/community boundary – would provide even more security.  Nobody – at least, as far as I’m aware – is proposing either of those suggestions; it is only ‘state’ boundaries which some would like to see closed.

And that tells us something about the mindset of those calling for reintroduction of stronger border controls across Europe.  Whatever their motivation is, it really is not about finding the most effective way of controlling the movement of terrorists.  Some European Union members have small land masses, but others are very much larger.  Merely imposing controls on one arbitrarily selected set of lines on a map regardless of the size of the territories included within those lines doesn’t look like a targeted response to a problem.  Controlling the movement of millions to try and identify the tens doesn’t look like a terribly efficient approach either, even assuming that it could actually succeed in identifying all the ‘targets’.

So what’s it really about?  It looks like a knee-jerk reaction that ‘something must be done’ and the something that is proposed just happens to fit with the existing prejudices of those proposing it.  The concept of ‘open internal borders’ is one of the achievements of the European project, although sadly the UK chose to opt out.  Demands for the rest of Europe to follow the UK lead look more like an attempt to justify the UK’s stance than a rational response to a particular problem.

Open borders do not come without problems, of course.  But a state the size of the US manages without any internal border controls – why should they be needed in Europe?

Open Borders

Tweet For many years, one of the sillier accusations thrown at Plaid by the London parties was that Independence would mean a string of border posts along Offa's Dyke. It was intended to make the idea of Independence look silly of course, but it was never something which Plaid advocated (although I did once suggest - jokingly - that if it was associated with a string of duty-free shops starting at the Severn Bridge services, it might even be quite a popular policy).

We have, on the contrary, always supported the concept of open borders within these islands, and my inclination would also be to support the Schengen Agreement, which has led to 15 members of the European Union abandoning border controls altogether between their countries. Border posts between the Schengen countries either stand disused, or, in many cases, have already been pulled down, and travel between the states concerned is now as easy as travel between counties in the UK – with just a sign marking the border.

The countries which signed up to Schengen have taken the view that it is more sensible and cost-effective to maintain a common external border, and to put their resources into controlling that, than to impose unnecessary border controls between each other. One of the main exceptions, of course, has been the UK, which has insisted on maintaining controls for people travelling to and from other EU states.

It was disappointing last week to see that, far from moving into line with the rest of the EU on this, the UK Government is actively seeking to introduce controls on movements between the UK and the Irish Republic; movements which have been uncontrolled for 80 years. I found myself wondering whether they would want to do the same for Wales and Scotland in the event of Independence.

There would be a rich degree of irony, given what London parties said about Plaid in the past, if a Welsh government signed up to Schengen and abolished border controls with most of the continent of Europe, but the Labour-Tory Little Englander separatists then insisted on creating border posts along Offa's Dyke.