Here's the thing with Brexit that has me flummoxed. I am admittedly far away and have no skin in the game, so this is a purely intellectual exercise for me (at least directly) - I have no idea what a "do it right Brexit" might actually look like. Free of the political drama and other stuff, if we had a magic wand and we could make everything happen exactly the way that we thought it should / we wanted it to, I don't even know what that would be.
I think the big confounder, something I hadn't understood previously (and can honestly say I only understand an inkling of now), is the Irish border. At least now I'm clear that Brexit is more complicated than one island, whole and complete, that trades a lot with Europe, going their own way.
All I get in this thread is a sea of Dislikes and agression but I’ll try and answer your question since it was asked in a friendly spirit.
A “right” Brexit as proposed by most prominent backers of Leave is one that entails ongoing security cooperation between strategic allies, and a wide and deep free trade relationship in keeping with that agreed between the EU and Canada. Crucially one that allows the UK to sign free trade deals with whoever else it chooses, in keeping with the positive vision of Brexit of escaping an inward looking protectionist European club, to look out to the world where most growth is. On paper such a deal is easy because you come from the starting point of complete regulatory and standards alignment.
The fly in the ointment as you point out is Northern Ireland. The Good Friday Agreement rests on the happy illusion that republicans can live their lives day to day as though they are not separate from Eire (I.e. you don’t notice when you cross the border). The reality of course is that Northern Ireland remains part of the Uk, is governed directly from London, has the pound as it’s currency and is subject to UK rates of income tax, corporation tax and VAT.
The EU’s negotiating position has been that it is happy to sign a simple Canada style deal with Britain (i.e. the UK less Northern Ireland). But that Northern Ireland must stay in the EU Single Market to “preserve its integrity”. The reason being it does not want Northern Ireland to in future be used as a backdoor to the EU for imports from third counties that may have zero tariffs with the UK but a tariff wall for imports into the EU. For example US autos!!
Clearly this solution is unacceptable from the perspective of maintaining the UK single market and it is also most likely not compliant with the Good Friday Agreement itself.
Setting up customs controls on the border is also of course not compliant with the Good Friday Agreement and when last attempted required thousands of troops to police.
The third way fudge therefore is to effectively keep the UK within the EU customs union (the Irish Backstop), such that the UK would be practically speaking unable to sign free trade deals with third countries and would be a rule taker of EU codes and standards, with disputes governed by the ECJ.
So what’s wrong with that? While some here imply that the Brexit vote was exclusively motivated by racism, the primary factor was in fact to be free of the highly centralised bureaucracy, remote judicial system and generally democratically unaccountable political system of the EU. The fudge of the EU backstop (or Corbyn’s proposed formal customs union) is therefore counter to the primary voting factor in the referendum.
So what’s the solution? Well some very smart people say it’s too hard, the UK should remain in the EU, nightmare over. Sure that’s one answer. But it does unquantifiable damage to the contract between voters and their government. The very campaign slogan for Leave was “take back control”. This appealed to many who felt they had lost control of their own destiny. And in many cases there are actually sound economic and social reasons to support their view that EU membership was at least a contributing factor to that sense of loss of control. Ignoring their vote (the largest democratic exercise in the history of the UK) would at best lead to mass political apathy. At worst it could do the opposite and drive voters in droves variously into the arms of Marxists and White Nationalists, as has been seen in parts of Europe’s south.
So we need another solution to “the problem”. To recap the problem. The EU is in essence worried that companies will fraudulently avoid EU tariffs / regulatory standards by using a customs-less Northern Ireland frontier as a backdoor to its Single Market. So a similar problem faced today due to creative large corporates using Dublin to avoid EU wide corporation tax (Apple!) or low grade smugglers of booze and tobacco. Doesn’t sound like such an intractable problem does it? The customs-less border can be easily solved using self declarations for registered small businesses and inventory tracking/audits of the big companies that represent the bulk of trade, with severe criminal sanctions for those that break it. More to the point it should not be hard to police. It would be quite hard to hide 3000 Model 3s being shipped from the US to Belfast and then carried over the border to Dublin, before being onward shipped to Germany.
That this problem has arisen is at its heart due to the EU’s insisted negotiating sequence - the UK must leave the EU first and only then talk about the future trading relationship. This sequence inevitably requires some guarantee (or backstop) to prevent there being a visible Irish border should a free trade deal and border arrangement not be concluded.
The Brexiteers argue that if the EU is operating in good faith to prevent a return of violence to Ireland, it should be willing to commit to such a solution upfront now, with the implementation to be defined later. That they are not, raises the suspicion that the EU are not acting in good faith and intend to use the Northern Irish backstop as a means to “trap” the UK in the customs union without representation. This fear was not smoothed by Macron boasting of this very feature of the Withdrawl Agreement some months ago. The backstop would allow the EU to offer up access to the UK market to third countries without reciprocation for the UK’s vital service industries. And since there is no legal unilateral exit mechanism from the backstop, the UK may after some time be forced to accept wholly unsatisfactory terms from the EU just to exit the backstop.
Hence you now see calls from some that the UK is better off leaving now on WTO terms than signing up to the indefinite backstop. Which if you are primarily concerned with “taking back control”, rather than taking the action which creates the lowest short term economic uncertainty, is the logical course.
Conversely many observers (including the PM) would see the backstop as a win, in that it gives control of immigration policy, withdrawal from the common agricultural/fisheries policies, no annual membership fee and a firm halt to the UK being part of the EU’s future integration projects (e.g. central treasury, combined army and diplomatic corps). All while causing minimal economic disruption and preserving just-in-time cross border trade flows.
It’s an incredibly nuanced debate and non-Europeans’ understanding of it is not helped by glib comparisons to the anti free trade, anti immigrant Trump phenomenon.
