The UK says it has a solution to avoid an Irish border post-Brexit. But the EU says it needs an insurance policy in case it doesn’t work. Both sides are singing from two completely different hymn sheets.
EU and UK negotiators are set to meet again next week for talks on a “backstop” solution for Northern Ireland that would avoid customs and regulatory checks at its land border with Ireland after Brexit.
In a speech on Friday 20 July, UK prime minister Theresa May recommitted to “including a legally operative backstop” in the final EU-UK exit treaty. But she insisted that a solution could be found “through a close future relationship”, the “third way” proposed in Britain’s recent white paper (see EUROPE 12061). “It is now for the EU to respond,” she told an audience in Belfast, “not simply to fall back onto previous positions which have already been proven unworkable, but to evolve their position in kind.”
The problem for both sides is both in form and in content.
The EU kept the Irish border issue separate so it would have more leverage and not be hijacked in a future trade deal. The UK believes that a future trade deal is the only way to solve it.
But the EU does not believe the ideas in the white paper - a free trade area for goods and food - are workable. Leaving aside the principles of single market integrity and indivisibility of the four freedoms, the white paper essentially outsources the bloc’s competences and fails to provide for all the regulatory checks the EU needs to police goods coming into its territory.
For the EU, while checks do not have to be done at the border, they have to be done across the board - to ensure pesticides are safe, to check whether food is genetically modified, to ensure goods imported meet all the EU’s rules on health and safety, animal welfare or the environment. “We need to find the right place and right time to carry out checks,” Michel Barnier said on Friday.
So the backstop - which in the EU’s text would keep Northern Ireland (not the rest of the UK) in a common regulatory and customs area with the bloc - is a deal breaker.
The UK has an equally entrenched problem, in that the EU’s backstop, which covers only Northern Ireland, is simply not politically feasible. In fact, Theresa May said on Friday it would also be “a breach of the spirit” of the 1998 Good Friday/Belfast peace agreement because it would cut the Unionist community off from the rest of the UK.
The EU says it is prepared to “amend” its backstop proposal, but the problem is, the UK has not only rejected it out of hand, it has stopped talking about the need for a backstop at all. (Sarah Collins)