Even if the Prime Minister can square the Irish situation, what he is proposing for Great Britain is ghastly.
We don’t know what Boris Johnson proposed to Leo Varadkar yesterday – or whether he will be able to do a deal. However, it looks like he may have made considerable concessions to the Irish Prime Minister over Northern Ireland.
In particular, Johnson may have abandoned his insistence on customs checks between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, as well as his requirement that his DUP allies should have a veto on what happens in Northern Ireland despite the fact that they only represent a minority of the population.
But whatever may or may not be agreed on Northern Ireland, our Prime Minister‘s proposals would be terrible for Great Britain. I set out the concerns when they were published last week. Here is a recap of the four main problems.
Cliff edge end 2020
Johnson wants Great Britain to quit the EU’s single market and customs union at the end of next year. He hopes that a new free-trade agreement (FTA) with the EU will kick in immediately after that. But that’s hopelessly optimistic. Ambitious FTAs typically take over five years to agree. So we’ll have to trade with the EU under World Trade Organisation instead.
That means tariffs on exports to the EU, customs controls gumming up our manufacturers’ supply chains and our industries losing their rights to operate in the EU. Our economy would fall off a cliff because the EU accounts for roughly half our entire trade.
Not even Canada
Johnson eventually hopes to negotiate an FTA with the EU like the one Canada has. But there’s no way the EU will agree to such a deal with the UK given that he wants to abandon the “level playing” provisions Theresa May negotiated. The UK is just too big a market and too close geographically for it to take the risk. The best we could hope for – even after five or more years of negotiation – is a bare-bones FTA. That would be permanently bad for the economy.
Back-door access to GB market via Ireland
Johnson was already proposing that Northern Ireland manufacturers have unfettered access to Great Britain. If he now agrees that there will be no checks at all on the Irish border, there will be little to stop goods coming from the EU into Northern Ireland and then crossing the Irish Sea into Great Britain.
Given that EU producers will have backdoor access into the UK, the bloc will have less incentive to do a FTA with us that opens up their market to us. The same goes for other countries which have deals with the EU. All that talk about global Britain doing buccaneering deals around the world will come to little.
Brexternity
The Prime Minister says we should “get Brexit done“. But his plans mean that the agony will go on and on. The only way to put this bawling baby to bed is to stop Brexit.
Like May, Johnson started off with the idea that no deal is better than a bad deal. Like her, he may now be shifting to the view that any deal is better than no deal. But by far the best outcome is no Brexit at all. That’s why MPs must insist that any deal must go back to the people in a referendum.