Three weeks from now the UK’s negotiations with the EU-27 will be reviewed at the European summit in Brussels. There will either be an agreement that satisfactory progress on the withdrawal agreement is being accomplished or that the talks are going nowhere and should be suspended.

It is a mistake to imagine that the Irish border is the only contentious issue. The intention, if things go well, is that three items will have been agreed by October in time for ratification before Brexit day, 29 March next year. These are the withdrawal agreement (including the Irish border solution), the terms of the 21-month post-Brexit transition agreement and a political declaration on UK-EU trading relationships from January 2021 onwards, when transition ends. There has been little significant progress, at least visible in the public domain, on any of these and the EU’s negotiator, Michel Barnier, has made it clear on several occasions that there will be no agreement in October unless the process picks up pace.

Impatience

Last Friday, Tánaiste Simon Coveney expressed his impatience with the continuing failure in London to spell out what the UK government envisages for the border in Ireland. Unless a written draft is available before the summit there will be an uncertain summer, he predicted. He was responding to the latest kite flown from Whitehall, a bizarre scheme floated in The Sun newspaper on behalf of the UK’s Brexit minister David Davis. It would involve a 10-mile twilight zone either side of the existing border which would have a distinct status different from either Northern Ireland or the Republic, two borders for the price of one.

There is simply no time to arrange the infrastructure of facilities and personnel needed to implement third-country status for the UK with the consequent certification requirements, border inspections and tariff compliance

The proposal was promptly rubbished from various quarters and it will not fly. But it is merely the latest in a series of improbable schemes designed to keep the border frictionless while the UK exits both customs union and single market. The schemes have all been judged unworkable because the project itself is impossible. With the entire UK outside the single market and customs union, and moreover outside the CAP and the food standards regime, there is no avoiding a hard border. Indeed there will be a whole series of them, with France, Belgium, the Netherlands and all other EU seaports and airports, not just in Ireland.

It is possible that the talks will be suspended when the summit concludes on 29 June, precipitating a new political crisis in London. Even if another fudged communique (“satisfactory progress but much more needs to be done”) can be cobbled together the summer holidays beckon and it is difficult to see what could actually be achieved before deadline day in the autumn.

Not just Ireland

If a deal can be done despite the shortness of time, it would postpone the ultimate introduction of trade frictions only until January 2021. If not, the trade barriers go up at the end of March next year, not just on the Irish border but at Holyhead, Fishguard and the English Channel ports. Nobody in the agri-food sector is under any illusions about the consequences and it is already clear that chaos is inevitable. There is simply no time to arrange the infrastructure of facilities and personnel needed to implement third-country status for the UK with the consequent certification requirements, border inspections and tariff compliance that would be needed.

While the political manoeuvring will always attract the media attention, some people are tempted to ignore it. Somewhere in the background, they argue, sensible officials must be beavering away to find practical solutions designed to minimise disruption to trade between the UK and its trading partners in Europe. The trouble is no group of officials on the UK side have been given any such damage-limitation mandate from the political leadership. The official line from Theresa May’s government has been that the UK will leave the European Union but that somehow nothing will change, business can continue as before.

There has been a reluctant concession more recently that there might be some frictions but these, should they arise, will be due to EU awkwardness. The reality that the UK cannot simultaneously be inside and outside the EU, a treaty-bound legal construct, is quite clear to business groups in the UK and they are finding their voice. Most of the problems, including problems with the Irish land border, would be manageable if the UK decided to follow the example of Norway and seek attachment to the EU’s single market as a non-member.

Unfortunately, May’s government has chosen to interpret the electorate’s injunction to quit the EU as an instruction to depart also the single market, a proposition which was not on the ballot paper. Perhaps a breakdown in the talks is not the worst of the possible outcomes at the Brussels summit – another fudge might be worse.

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