Is it really possible, asks Hamlet as he watches Fortibras’s army march across the stage (or three of four of them anyway), that these twenty thousand men go to seize nothing but a bit of the Polish frontier, some little patch of ground that, as the Captain says, ‘hath in it no profit but the name’?
All this expense of men and money for what? A quarrel over a straw, an eggshell. We too today may stand amazed at the spectacle of the EU launching its battalions to dispute a another little patch of ground - between Newry and Dundalk – insisting that the question of this frontier must be settled before the Withdrawal Agreement with the UK can be agreed, even though there is still no agreement at all on future UK/EU trading arrangements. The Irish border ‘backstop’, says the EU, cannot depend on subsequent trade agreements – or lack of them – while the UK says it is not possible to say what kind of a border there will be until a trade agreement is reached – or not.
It beggars belief that that this issue has been allowed to become such a stumbling block on the road to Brexit. The amount of trade across the Irish border is hardly worth bothering about – even for the Irish, never mind the rest of the EU. London, Dublin and Brussels all say they have no wish for any new border infrastructure (border posts, customs checks etc) to be introduced. So, as David Davis, the former Brexit minister, observed, ‘People might be forgiven for wondering what the exact problem is’.
After all, it’s not as if there was currently no border. Different VAT rates and excise duties have made cross-border smuggling, especially in diesel, a quite profitable business for years, not least for, it is widely believed in Belfast, former members of the IRA. And then there is illegal immigration – everyone knows that the Irish police are on the lookout for people on south-bound buses who are pretending to be going to work. All this keeps customs officers and police quite busy as it is. And there are cameras on the border and checks on standards of food for export at factories away from the border. The UK contends that, after Brexit, electronic monitoring, trusted trader rules and exemptions for small business would be quite adequate to ensure that Northern Ireland did not become a ‘back door’ into the Single Market. Unfortunately such proposals have been dismissed as ‘magical thinking’ by the EU.
Territory grab
So the ‘exact problem’ now is the EU’s insistence on the backstop – what it says would need to happen if a free trade agreement between the UK and the EU were not agreed. And that, it says, would be that ‘Northern Ireland shall be considered part of the customs territory of the European Union’.
This is such an outrageous claim – putting a trade border between two parts of the UK and, from the Ulster perspective, attempting to effectively annex the province – that not even the UK government could entertain it. But instead of telling Mr Barnier to take a running jump and go whistle for his £40bn, as the then Foreign Secretary might have put it, it came up with the Chequers proposal, which more or less extended the EU’s ‘customs territory’ to the entire UK. This went down well with no-one – even Mr Barnier is reported to have called it ‘insane’.
So there is deadlock and the Withdrawal Agreement is supposed to be signed in November. But why have things got to such a pass, why is the problem so hard to solve? Cui bono?
Well there are the usual suspects, of course. The EU would much prefer the UK to remain in the customs union. As Barnier has said, it would be ‘much easier’ for them. Multi-national businesses, worried about disruption of their supply trains, would also prefer it. Most Remainers in all parties never stop telling us it’s ‘in the national interest’ and even the Labour Party seems now to support it, despite its leader’s life-long hostility to the capitalist agenda of the EU.
And then there is Irish politics. Most people in Belfast think that Mr Varadkar is taking such a hard line on the border because he is trying to boosts his position by appeasing Sinn Fein voters. And Sinn Fein, of course, sees Brexit as an opportunity to break up the UK and bring about a united Ireland. For them the border issue is no straw.
And then there is the UK government itself. Mrs May has insisted that Brexit means Brexit, that Britain must leave the customs union and the single market and so on, but a lot of people think she’s going a funny way about it. They suspect that the border problem is being used, if not by her then by those who advise her, to shift the UK’s position so that it ends up in what is in reality a customs union, whatever they choose to call it. And with the Chequers proposal to accept a common rule book – in effect, the acquis communautaire – they have pretty much offered to stay in the single market too.
So instead of telling the EU it can have its £bn if it stops being so pig-headed about the border and settles for a Canada-style trade deal, May looks likely to give even more ground on Chequers – services, free movement etc – and pass it off as an unavoidable compromise.
After all, most of her cabinet never wanted to leave the EU anyway so they may hope to fob the voters off with BRINO, a remainer’s Brexit. Of course that might mean electoral disaster for May and her party.
It is right, concluded Hamlet, to find quarrel even in a straw when honour’s at the stake, though in this case honour has little to do with it.