Northern ireland

With 31 working days until negotiations time out, Theresa May has been selling her vision for post-Brexit Britain to businesses in Northern Ireland. The Prime Minister is hoping her visit will reaffirm the government’s commitment to thwarting any chance of a hard border and sell an agreement that Northern Ireland can get behind, all the while searching for the key to unlock the Westminster stalemate. Those addressed by May – a business community in Northern Ireland that has endured years of uncertainty on the future of trade with their neighbours – has thus far been drowned out by the political noise. Yet while our politicians talk, businesses in Ireland have been quietly doing what they do best: making decisions and going for growth.

On Saturday, a car bomb went off in the UK. In Londonderry, Northern Ireland, to be exact. It was the latest in a long, long list of terrorist-related incidents in Northern Ireland, many of them carried out by men who wish to unite the island of Ireland in one state. Today, the European Commission stated, more bluntly than it ever has before, that Britain leaving the EU without a deal will mean a hard border between the EU (Ireland) and the UK (Northern Ireland). That means checkpoints and men in uniform policing the physical division of the island of Ireland. Let us, if such a thing is possible, set aside questions of whether that hard border is truly inevitable in a no-deal exit. Let us also set aside any questions of blame for the prospect of that hard border.

Sir: What James Forsyth calls ‘the EU plan’ to keep Northern Ireland in the customs union after Brexit (‘The Irish problem’, 20 October) would no more ‘ease Northern Ireland away from the UK and push it more towards Dublin’s orbit’ than it has already done itself through numerous legislative differences. With regard to social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage, Northern Ireland is far closer to the Republic (as it once was) than to the rest of the UK. It would therefore be no great stretch to avoid awkwardness of land border checks (and respect the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement) by having such checks at the sea ports.

Mrs May says she is taking her stand on the issue of Northern Ireland and the integrity of the United Kingdom. If so, good; but it cannot be the whole truth. After all, she surrendered on the Irish border issue in negotiations last December until, at the very last minute, the DUP forced her to row back. I think the irreducible core of her position is something which she does not fully disclose: that she is determined to keep Britain in the customs union, though perhaps only approximately and certainly by another name. This cannot work, surely, because to the EU it is ‘cherry-picking’ and to the Brexiteers it is BRINO, but there must be a reason why she revives it each time it is stamped on.

The UK and the EU are playing a dangerous game of chicken over the Irish border, I say in The Sun this morning. There has been almost no progress on this issue over the summer and without a deal on it, there can’t be a withdrawal agreement. One of those involved in the negotiations on the British side tells me, the EU ‘believe we will blink first’. But that won’t happen. One Brexit red line that Theresa May is adamant she’ll never cross is her insistence that no British PM could sign the EU’s proposed text on the Irish border, which would see Northern Ireland become part of the customs territory of the EU. Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, is prepared to produce a de-dramatised version of the backstop.

Karen Bradley, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, would not, perhaps, win prizes for her in depth knowledge of sectarian politics in her patch – in an interview for the House magazine she said she had never realised that nationalists don’t vote for unionists, and vice versa (though that, actually, may change, given how Sinn Fein’s pro abortion, pro gay marriage gives Catholic voters the creeps) – but she’s on the ball in one respect.

Predictably enough, there have been no calls this week for the Irish referendum on abortion to be re-run, no complaint from Ken Clarke about the ‘-tyranny of the majority’, no moaning that the campaign had been in any way unfair. Neither should there have been. The Irish people have made a fair and democratic choice and the result should be respected. Less respect seems to have been forthcoming, however, for the views of the Northern Irish on abortion. On the contrary, no sooner was the result from south of the border announced than the calls began for the government in Westminster to impose its will on Northern Ireland and liberalise the province’s abortion laws.

Never one to shy away from a platitude, the shadow attorney general, Shami Chakrabarti, has declared that the PM must reform abortion law in Northern Ireland on the basis that women there “have been let down by privileged women and men for too long” and that, so far as Theresa May is concerned, “the test of  feminists is whether they stick up for all women”. So far as this woman is concerned, I’ve been trying to work out the logic of these observations in terms of the abortion question and failing, so let’s just give up and cut to the chase.

Power-sharing talks at Stormont have dramatically collapsed again. This is a shock to many in Northern Ireland, where an apparent thawing in the relationship between the DUP and Sinn Fein led to speculation that the announcement of a deal was imminent. Instead, the stasis continues. Northern Ireland has now been without a functioning government for just over 13 months, since Sinn Fein first plunged Northern Irish politics into limbo by pulling out of their pact with the DUP in January 2017. The reason for their decision to back out of the power sharing agreement was Arlene Foster's apparent complicity – which she has denied – in the botched 'cash for ash' scandal.

I’m afraid I have a deep faith in the Democratic Unionist Party’s capacity to cede an issue of principle in return for more gold, baubles, Renewable Heat Incentives etc. It may well give in, after receiving some bung, in a few days. But its resistance, at the time of writing, to the idea of ‘regulatory alignment’ with the Republic, seems wholly justified. This is not a pernickety matter solely for the province — it should apply just as much to the entire United Kingdom. If we agree to align trade rules with EU ones (as opposed to each recognising the other’s rules), we are sacrificing the economic point of Brexit, which is competitive advantage.

As Theresa May sits down to lunch with Jean-Claude Juncker to try and persuade the EU Commission to give Britain the green light to talk trade, confusion reigns over what concessions the UK government is making in order to do this. There are reports that a solution to the Irish border has been found.  A draft version is said to promise 'continued regulatory alignment' – if no solutions are found: 'In the absence of agreed solutions the UK will ensure that there continues to be continued regulatory alignment with those rules of the internal market + customs union which, now or in the future, support North South cooperation +protection of the GFA.

‘Here we go again’, says the Sun, which criticises the ‘chorus of doom-mongers’ who pop up whenever the government proposes a ‘sensible, serious suggestion for moving towards Brexit’. On Tuesday, this reaction was sparked by details setting out plans for a customs union after Brexit. Now, a fresh wave of cynicism has greeted the idea of a ‘frictionless’ border between Northern Ireland and Ireland. “It can’t be done,” they groan,’ says the Sun - expect, according to the paper, it already is. Take the border between Norway and Sweden, for example, which has ‘almost exactly the same arrangement that is being proposed for Ireland’.

Avoiding a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland is the government’s top aim in Brexit talks. Brussels wants much the same: the EU Parliament’s chief Brexit negotiator Guy Verhofstadt has insisted that there should be no return to a fixed border. This is an aspiration shared by the EU, which makes the issue one of its three priorities before Brexit talks can proceed to the next stage. The Tories' new friends-in-government are also agreed - and so, too, is the Irish government. Rarely does Brexit generate such unanimity. So if all sides are agreed, you’d be forgiven for thinking things should be straightforward. Unfortunately not.

The question of what kind of border after Brexit will exist between Northern Ireland and the Republic will, I predict, become a very thorny one indeed as negotiations crawl into the autumn. Talk of ‘putting the border in the Irish Sea’ — somehow leaving the north inside the EU for customs and immigration purposes, but cut off from European funding — was a red herring that provoked DUP tantrums, but more significant was the weekend outburst from Taoiseach Leo Varadkar. As far as his government is concerned ‘there shouldn’t be an economic border… and we’re not going to help [the British] design some sort of border that we don’t believe should exist in the first place.

There are three areas on which the EU insists that the Brexit negotiations must make progress on, before proper trade talks can start: the so-called divorce bill, the rights of EU citizens in the UK and the Irish border. Today, the Irish PM said that no progress had been made on this issue, that the Brexiteers had had 14 months to devise a plan and hadn’t come up with anything adequate. Implicit in the Taoiseach’s speech is a threat to block the start of trade talks this autumn. If Dublin doesn’t think any progress had been made on the border question, the European Commission is highly unlikely to recommend to the Council that the EU moves on to the next stage of the negotiations.