I'm glad the UK is a member of the EU so we can benefit from this.
The withdrawal agreement negotiated by May does fulfill those criteria, but Brexiters still don’t like it — fancy that.
which is the sort of term a victor of war forces on a defeated party
the ERG agreed earlier this week that if this part of the agreement is dropped they will vote for it, otherwise it will never be accepted
A major change like that should not have been decided by a slim majority. Normally changes in parliament that are big require some super majority. It was a dubious narrow win, and according to polls the old people who voted leave are dead and it's a clear majority to remain.
You got a small group of hardliners in the majority government holding them hostage. The government who lost most of their seats in the vote after the referendum (kind of showing that people didn't really want it) but only held on due to a sneaky pairing up with a small Irish party called the DUP.
No one wants the deal offered, no one (but a few hardliners) wants no deal. Most want to remain but it's being forced on us because "will of the people". It's madness.
I'm pretty sure that fifteen years ago, nobody would have thought that "let's keep the bombings" would be a coherent and respectable opinion.
Things have changed.
if you'd take the time to read the good friday agreement you'd realise there's nothing about customs controls or a border anywhere in it
The legal technicalities of that are debatable, but let's assume for this discussion that there exists a clear legal obligation to do so.
Which specific obligation(s) under the GFA do you think would or would not be satisfied by which specific proposal(s) that have been made in relation to the NI/Ireland border?
Which specific obligation(s) under the GFA do you think would or would not be satisfied by which specific proposal(s) that have been made in relation to the NI/Ireland border?
A lot of rather non-specific claims seem to get made in debates around Brexit, of the form "someone must do something to avoid violating the GFA", but without any supporting argument about why. The Agreement is publicly available and not a long document, so anyone can read it. I think it would further useful and interesting debate if more people did, because it doesn't actually say what quite a lot of people seem to think it does.
It doesn't. You keep referring to a legal document, as if it's the legal document that matters. The legal document enshrines rights, but it was written in the context of both Ireland and UK being EU members - there was no reason to explicitly add things that came with the EU, or with the Common Travel Area, into the document, since they were part of the situation already.
But in any case, to the specifics of the document.
Declaration Of Support, clause 3:
> We are committed to partnership, equality and mutual respect as the basis of relationships within Northern Ireland, between North and South, and between these islands.
How can there be equality if Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland face a border when they go south, but Unionist British nationalists don't face a border when they go east?
In the Agreement between Government of UK and Government of Ireland, Article 1, the two governments:
> acknowledge that while a substantial section of the people in Northern Ireland share the legitimate wish of a majority of the people of the island of Ireland for a united Ireland, the present wish of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland, freely exercised and legitimate, is to maintain the Union and accordingly, that Northern Ireland’s status as part of the United Kingdom reflects and relies upon that wish; and that it would be wrong to make any change in the status of Northern Ireland save with the consent of a majority of its people
Do you think putting a hard border between NI and the Republic constitutes a change in the status of Northern Ireland without a consent of the majority of its people, against the legitimate wishes of people in Northern Ireland and a majority on the island?
Don't forget that the only people representing Northern Ireland in this debacle of UK government dysfunction is the one NI party that voted against the GFA.
Indeed - if the Irish or the EU choose to erect a hard border it would indeed go against those wishes, and the UK should not allow them to do it.
If we're making arguments about what the UK government can or can't do, it is the legal documents that matter. The rest is a matter of political judgement, obviously with significant implications, but it's not a binding constraint.
How can there be equality if Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland face a border when they go south, but Unionist British nationalists don't face a border when they go east?
I think you're stretching the intent of that clause. Clearly there isn't equality with NI being part of the UK but not part of Ireland either, and that's a much more fundamental difference in governance.
Do you think putting a hard border between NI and the Republic constitutes a change in the status of Northern Ireland without a consent of the majority of its people, against the legitimate wishes of people in Northern Ireland and a majority on the island?
Again, I think you're distorting the meaning with the selective quoting here. The change of status refers to the previous wording, which is about the right of the people of NI to determine whether to remain part of the UK or to become part of a united Ireland notwithstanding any overall majority on the island of Ireland for reunification.
It's hard to see how we can do that as, er, not members of the European Union. I believe the Common Travel Area is also a key issue as it commits us to open travel through the border which on the face of it seems incompatible with leaving the customs union.
The problem is the Brexit camp won't actually say exactly what they want, or exactly what their solutions to these problems are. They don't want to be in the customs union, by and large because it would restrict our ability to do trade deals outside the EU, but they won't say how specifically they would manage cross-border travel and checks which changes incompatible with the customs union might require. Until we find out what those deals outside the EU actually are, we can't say specifically what impact they might or might not have on the transport of goods and people.
The Brexit camp want to cast this whole situation as the EU and Irish Republic forcing us to do this or that. They aren't. We freely and willingly went into all these commitments, many of which we were the driving force behind initiating and we're the ones threatening to tear them all up and force changes on them.
The brexit camp are full of red lines for what they don't want, but have yet to present any credible plan clearly specifying what they actually do want, what it's consequences would be and how to implement it.
It's hard to see how we can do that as, er, not members of the European Union.
This is the standard NI-border-tail-wagging-dog argument that you can't have Brexit at all because of wording in the GFA, but it's fundamentally flawed in two different ways.
Firstly, your quote of the GFA is selective. Read the words just before the ones you mentioned, which fundamentally change the meaning.
Secondly, both the UK and Ireland are signatories to the EU treaties, including the TFEU that provides for withdrawal of a member state under Article 50. As a matter of international law, to the extent that any earlier treaty between those parties is contradicted by a later treaty to which they are also signatories, the later one takes precedence. (This is why I noted before that the legal technicalities are debatable.)
I agree with the spirit of the rest of your comment, in that advocates of Brexit need to get their story straight so there are concrete discussions to be had, so I won't comment further on those points here.
No, this happens elsewhere already. Compare Norway - it is in a common travel area with the EU (Schengen), but out of the EU customs union. They're different issues.
Article 1 part iii:
"and that it would be wrong to make any change in the status of Northern Ireland save with the consent of a majority of its people;"
A majority of NI didn't vote for Brexit, and a hard border would change the status of NI?
The point of that provision was that across the entire island of Ireland there was a majority for a reunited Ireland, but within NI specifically there was not, so this was an explicit agreement that reuniting North and South would not happen without the consent of the people of Northern Ireland alone.
If you're asking for my personal, subjective opinion, then I think it's a combination of two factors.
Firstly, there are the local issues. Taken in isolation, avoiding changes that would unnecessarily restrict crossings at the NI/Ireland border is obviously a good thing, particularly for the people and businesses near that border. Meanwhile, closing the border has little upside for anyone at this level. That means maintaining the open border is a solid vote-winner, like having more funding for the NHS or more teachers in schools.
Any resulting costs will be elsewhere, in this case at a national/international level where potentially the open border could conflict with other possibly desirable outcomes. But of course there are complicated legal issues involved because of the history, and on top of that there is an implied threat of violence that can be invoked. It is very easy to paint a picture where changing the Irish border causes Very Bad Things to happen, and thus not changing the Irish border becomes an attractive proxy for blocking those other outcomes if in your view they are not so desirable but it's harder to make a direct case against them.
In short, there are important local considerations, but at national/international level it's also a convenient vessel for blocking other changes that some parties don't want.
It's probably a rather cynical point of view, but the proxy debate going on here does remind me of the people in the UK who suddenly became constitutional scholars and fierce advocates of this concept they'd never heard of a week earlier called parliamentary sovereignty, right around the time that a referendum widely advertised as giving the people a final say returned a result they didn't support but it turned out that constitutionally the referendum couldn't be binding after all and the current balance of opinion in Parliament might go the other way. It's a very large scale version of getting bogged down in legal technicalities, unfortunately at the expense of more reasoned debate on the underlying issues of substance.
The DUP are pro brexit, but I suppose would like the best of both worlds if they could, but weren't in favour of the proposed backstop.
Teresa May, appears to me to be the principle agent, but while a remainer, seems to be more in favour of keeping her party together, than doing what's best for the country. So I cant really see her going for the backstop, and continuing to defend it without good reason.
As of today? The EU and particularly Ireland, though I think it's a fundamentally flawed strategy that probably will not result in the outcome they are hoping for.
The practical problem for the negotiators is that it was an idea that originated from the UK, so it's very hard for the UK to now turn around and say they don't want it after all, even though it has become the true red line for getting the proposed WA past the UK Parliament and into effect.
1) The backstop is just that: a backstop. It applies only if and as long as the "frictionless" arrangements for the NI border, which everyone wants and everyone has very publicly said they want, doesn't happen. So as soon as that happens, no more backstop.
2) UKGov claimed that this frictionless trade technology/mechanism exists and can be made to work, but in the months (or years) couldn't actually come up with a single bit of evidence that this is actually so. So the EU said, hey, we believe you can come up with this, and we will do our best, but in the meantime we have to have some sort of guarantee in place for the off-chance that it doesn't work.
So now parts of UKGov and the press are screaming bloody murder that the backstop will keep the UK in shackles "forever". Huh? You told us that you have this way of making the border frictionless. If that's actually true, why is the backstop a problem? So were you lying to us?
3) The only requirement is for the frictionless arrangements/backstop to apply to Northern Ireland, in order not to endanger the Good Friday Agreement, which, incidentally, is a binding agreement voluntarily entered into by the UK (so effectively part of the UK constitution). Extending this to the whole of the UK was something UKGov demanded.
The Norway-Sweden border would be one example. Just like Ireland-Northern Ireland, they are not in a customs union but allow free movement of people.
Sweden and Norway are both Schengen members, so they have explicitly agreed on freedom of movement for people. That does not say anything about goods.
But I don't know why such an arrangement could not work with the UK (both the UK and Norway are members of the European Economic Area) – presumably because the UK wants to leave that as well, because they want to go it alone and not align their trade policies with the European partners?
The first is simply whether people have a right to physically cross the border. This is, broadly speaking, the Common Travel Area that was established on the island of Ireland long before the EU or any of its predecessors existed.
The next is Freedom of Movement, which is one of the "Four Freedoms" that underpin the EU Single Market. This is also about people, but rather than physical movement, it relates to what they can legally do. Notably, it grants someone from one side of the border rights to live and work on the other.
The third is customs. This is about moving goods across the border, whether tariffs are payable to do so, and the mechanisms for monitoring and enforcing any such tariffs. At present, with the UK and Ireland both in the EU and its Customs Union, there are no tariffs and so no checks or infrastructure are needed.
The fourth is regulatory compliance. This is also about moving goods across the border, but it's about the non-tariff barriers, such as whether products for sale meet environmental or safety standards, or whether live animals or food products meet health requirements. These matters are typically regulated at the level of the EU's Single Market, so again, with the UK and Ireland both in the SM there are no discrepancies in standards and any accreditations for testing on one side are recognised by the other, meaning no need for additional verification at the point of crossing the border.
Of course there are also other issues with cross-border trade; notably, the above doesn't cover anything to do with provision of services. But in terms of physical crossings, those are the main points, and they are quite distinct.
It's the last two that are the problem - the customs is the immediate one (as regulations won't change on March 31st), the latter has potential to cause major problems in the future, unless the UK remains aligned with EU standards.
Exactly. And this is the same situation for Ireland & Northern Ireland, post-Brexit. The UK and Ireland have a Common Travel Area which guarantees the free movement of people, just like the Schengen agreement.
"they want to go it alone and not align their trade policies with the European partners?"
The UK wants to negotiate free trade with the EU, but to not be a member of the customs union. The advantage of this is that it allows the UK to make its own trade agreements with other third countries.
The main UK opposition party (Labour), however, does want the UK to remain a member of the customs union.
I know that you're trying to set up an argument where it's supposed to be the EU's fault if border posts appear, but that's misleading. The UK changes things, the UK is responsible.
Edit: details here https://www.ft.com/content/2d30482c-da7e-11e7-a039-c64b1c09b...
I’m not suggesting this is a desirable or unproblematic solution for Northern Ireland, but to claim that it is “not possible” is false.
Any free trade agreement between the UK and EU would of course have “EEA-like” clauses to ensure regulatory alignment.
Norway basically applies all EU laws without being able to vote on them.
Fine by me, if the UK wants that. Oh, and by the way, Norway declared it doesn't want the UK in the EEA: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/07/norweg...
That type of border would be a disaster in Ireland.
Freedom of movement of people between Ireland and the UK is covered by the CTA. That won't change come March 31st.
Freedom of goods, services, and capital however would. The Norway Sweden border does not allow freedom of movement of goods. That's a major problem in Ireland, as you can't inspect goods passing between the north and the rest like you can between Norway and Sweden.
So why bother with a border at all?
The WTO say you have to secure your border to be a member. Imagine the UK charging high tarrifs on imports of Japanese cars. That's fine, Japan charges tarrifs on UK microwaves (or whatever).
So the UK simply moves its goods over the border to Ireland and sells them using the EU tarrifs. Japan gets pissed, and the WTO interceeds.
A cheese factory in Newry buys milk from a farm in Castleblayney (who's cows roam both sides of the border) and a farm Middletown. It then sells its cheese to a pie factory in Dundalk and a wholesaler in Omagh. The former make cheese and onion pies (onions from Coleraine), and sells them to shops in Belfast and Dublin, the latter simply packages them up and ships them to supermarkets in Galway and Lisburn.
That's a nightmare when there's a customs border between the north and south, even if it's a magical invisible one.
obviously there's no problem if you are of the belief that the EU would act fairly in the situation where a new workable friction-less trade technology/mechanism is created
the ERG do not share this belief: their view is that if the withdrawal agreement is signed then the EU has no incentive to ever permit the UK to leave the temporary arrangement, as it would lose control over the UK economy and trade policy without gaining anything in return
they believe it's all about incentives, and in this case: they're probably right
Because there are always small details cropping up later that need to be fixed "fairly".
Unfortunately that fits very well within the "go whistle" stance, and that's why I don't really support any Brexit deal and think the UK should just crash out, consequences be damned.
it's obviously counter-productive to your interests in a negotiation to put your competitor into a position that gives them complete power over you that you can never exit without their permission
The all-UK backstop is an EU concession to the UK. The UK fought and asked for it, and other parties - e.g. France - are not in favour of it. It is not a plot to control the UK.
For example, it only binds the UK mainland to follow harmonized laws in effect at the beginning of the backstop, and not to track dynamic changes to the regulatory landscape. Lack of dynamic tracking means UK has a built-in and potentially growing advantage over the rest of the EU, should it ever remain in effect for long.
In any case, it's strongly in the UK's interest to have more integration than the backstop - to actually track closer to EU regulation than the backstop enforces - because the EU will continue to be the UK's single most significant economic partner, and the closest regulatory superpower. The UK doesn't have enough weight to get global suppliers to make special products for its domestic market if the regulations are different.
It’s only the ERG’s inflated sense of England’s greatness that makes it hard for them to comprehend that the EU actually has bigger goals than just attaching itself to the UK.
This misunderstanding has led Brexiters to be consistently wrong in their analyses and predictions throughout this process. Right from easiest deal in history, to having your cake and eating it too, to wondering why doesn’t the Republic of Ireland just subjugate itself to the UK and give up their independence.
The backstop is publicly popular in Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland voted by a substantial majority to Remain. The DUP is the only party that voted against the peace agreement.
It was the UK who wanted the backstop to be extended to Great Britain, not the EU.
Because that's horrifying, and I can't see how else to read your comment.
You don't think there might be a point in the future where we want to trade with any of the other 26 countries of the EU ever again?
You want to declare war on them to support our project of making UK an economic backwater ... I thought I'd heard it all ... wow.
What's your position on importing food? Given we don't produce enough to feed us and if we revert land to food use we'll have to sacrifice higher profit uses (e.g. we export seed potatoes, but import potatoes, because that's financial beneficial). Do you think other countries have excess to sell us just sitting around in warehouses?
That works, mostly, when you're a large org doing things like not paying workers (but, unions!) or you're a government disenfranchising citizens (but elections, coups), etc..
However, try it with someone who has power over you - like your police force, your bank, your boss ... now realise that the EU is the strongest organisation in the region. We, in the UK, really, really, need them for food security, for energy security, possibly for defense of things keep going the way they are with Russia.
Sure, they want us, but if we piss off the EU even more then we're going to have to dramatically change our lifestyle in order not to starve; and I don't know about you but I want the UK, and the EU, to thrive.
This contract matters, as does keeping free movement on the island. For everyone in Ireland, north and south, and many in Britain too.
I don't think any sane person wants to go back to mortar attacks on Westminster.
It seems strange how we dealt with the ever present threat of the IRA differently to the threat of Islamist terrorism.
Yet in terms of casualties the IRA killed more people more regularly.
> threat of the IRA differently to the threat of Islamist terrorism
Fully agree. The overreaction has been extreme. I don't understand why the political reaction hasn't been more like it was.
A sort of 'would they do this in East Germany? Then maybe we shouldnt' yardstick.
Also I think a lot of the over reaction to terrorism is just a power/land grab by the intelligence services, I mean they do valuable work but we don't really know how much and what the net benefit of any is.
The leaks have been egregious fairly consistently though.
Snowden has my respect for confirming what a lot of us techies suspected but couldn't prove.
I think there might be some mileage in your theory. :)
The UK has an odd relationship with intelligence thanks to the Bletchley Park story being part of our WW2 myths. I've always thought it goes some way to explaining our politicians being so keen on the UK being so excessive and early with things like CCTV everywhere.
Which brings us to now when even with all that tech, terrorists seem able to do what terrorists do just as well. At which point it's hard not to become cynical.
But intentionally breaching an international agreement probably isn't the best way of starting a brave new era of signing new international trade agreements, even before the likely resulting strife in NI is considered.
Because you can't put a new border between Northern Ireland and Ireland.
Just because it does more trade with England doesn't mean anything, that's because England is bigger. What's more important is that you can't put a border or wall or customs check really between NI and Ireland.
There are three possible outcomes here. Reverse course to remain, May's deal, or a hard Brexit. Each has about 1/3 support, and so none of them can win a vote. However the default if there is no further legislation is a hard Brexit.
Now to this issue.
Few want a border between the two halves of Ireland. Few want a border between Ireland and Great Britain. The price that the EU wants for no border is that the UK has to continue to comply with all EU regulation, and the UK gets no say in said regulation. Few in the UK want that.
The inevitable result is that, whatever happens, most people won't want that outcome. But that won't matter because they can't agree on whatever other outcome they would have wanted instead.
And this is how train-wrecks happen in slow motion.
The withdrawal agreement ensures that the UK will leave the EU entirely within a fixed period with the exception of a tiny, economically isolated region which actually voted to remain, which would continue to be subject to some Single Market rules (to its immense economic benefit) under a temporary provision unless and until it was replaced by a subsequent agreement or an arbitration committee was persuaded that the UK had devised a customs regime which didn't conflict with the UK's separate legal obligations to uphold the GFA and WTO trading rules.
Which is the sort of term that people claiming to want to launch a new era of trade agreements with the whole world and claiming that the Irish border could be adequately solved with technology wouldn't be particularly bothered by if they believed what they were saying. (Irish Unionists have more obvious reasons to oppose the deal due to the symbolic importance of an Irish Sea border and their own interpretations of the GFA)
I'm not super caught up on the deal and the various takes. What is this referring to and what interpretation of the Good Friday Agreement is unfavorable to the deal?
Even assuming this was the sole purpose of it today (an extremely ignorant opinion if you ask me, and one that I don't see being backed by OP with evidence) it still doesn't prove that that's what "freedom of movement" is for. At best it would show that that's what it became.
It's more or less like saying that cars are for polluting the environment. They may or may not pollute but certainly that's not their defining trait, rather just a side-effect.
Unfortunately much of the population commenting here was born in a "freedom of movement" environment as such they have very little personal experience with its benefits for anyone. They did however read an article in the Sun once.
- the EU single market
- an EU customs union
- a free trade area
The EU is not a "free trade zone".
Note the Canadian flag on the far right (pun imtended). It was one of the options on offer.
The EU has actually never been willing to discuss trade deals with the UK, let alone "let's be like Canada". So far it's refused entirely to even start such discussions. Barnier says a lot of things, as do others involved in the EU, but those things aren't consistent.
You obviously know that and are pretending to be ignorant, considering it was all over the news at the times.
No UK monkey was ever able to understand this. "Just walking away will make this obligations disappear". And "paying them is the fee that we get all the EU rights with no obligations".
The treaties are very clear. Two years after invoking Article 50 all rights and obligations terminate.
Pensions are obligations of the EU itself, not the UK. The fact that the EU has failed to invest properly into a pension fund and is structuring its pensions as a ponzi scheme is not the problem of former members.
If people are able to move freely, then each country should be able to apply tariffs to extract benefits from the economic gradients. If people can move freely, then that's the ideal.
Institutions, governments, "nations" and companies that collapse because of the free movement of people deserve to collapse and should be left to due so. The should even be "helped" to collapse faster and harder, making sure they never rise again!
One somewhat ironic possible outcome if there is a hard Brexit is that the UK could subsequently form a relationship with the CPTPP group that is broadly similar in nature to the new Japan-EU agreement.
Hmm...
All I'm saying is that the original comment by tonyedgecomb seems a bit pessimistic, because whatever happens with Brexit, either the UK will retain the benefits of the new EU arrangement or the UK and Japan have declared a very public intention to form an analogous agreement as quickly as possible to retain the same benefits for both parties.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/26/an-seeks-early...
The trouble is if the UK leaves, it loses all the benefits of being in the EU.
- Lorlin switches, and there is (probably "used to be") a Möller plant in the UK.
- A hammer made by Thorex. Good concept, poor quality.
- A saw made by Thomas Flinn. Poor steel.
- Fountain pen ink.
- Well that was a short list. Perhaps some English books I have were printed in UK. Though probably not.
...and pretty much any low-paid job.
We used to have machines that washed our cars, that's now been replaced by the Polish as they can do it for cheaper (and better).
If you want to know why we became a service economy with a heavy focus on banking and the City of London, the neoliberals in the Tory and Labour parties are responsible,