Of course No Deal will harm both sides, but it's kind of ironic that in a 500 page document, it's one item that is causing the issue. One issue. Kind of mad, but then did Varadker over play his hand in all this? Or was he a patsy?
It's one item, but it's a pretty hefty one.
As I understand it, the backstop is imaging a situation where:
- Britain is out of the common market, and no longer has customs and regulatory alignment with the rest of the EU.
- Britain and the EU have not yet been able to agree a free trade deal
- Noone has been able to come up with a technical mechanism for undertaking custom and border checks automatically or remotely.
Frankly, that doesn't look like an unlikely scenario to me. Given the way negotiations have gone over the exit agreement, I think it's actually more likely that not.
So we're imagining that scenario.....and it seems to be that there's three logical solutions to cover it:
1) You set up a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic to undertake the necessary customs and border checks
2) You set up a hard border in the Irish Sea to undertake the necessary customs and border checks
3) You just don't bother doing customs and border checks at all between the EU and the UK.
(I guess solution 4 is that you postpone Brexit until you can agree a free trade deal.....but I'll assume that Brexiteers won't ever agree to that)
Both sides have clearly agreed that (for historical reasons as much as any) they don't want Option #1.
The backstop is Option #2.
Removing the backstop and otherwise signing the rest of May's exit agreement is basically, by default, assuming Option #3.
Honestly, if I'm the EU and I'm trying to maintain a single market of 27 countries, with regulatory alignment and free movement of people, goods and services......I'm going to be seriously loathe to allow completely open border with a non-member state with whom we do not have a trade agreement in place - even one with such close historic ties as Britain. That's better than EU membership and basically would be what everybody wants.
So I can actually 100% see why the backstop is a firm red line for them.
I've long thought that if you're Britain and you want a Hard Brexit, unless and until you agree that trade deal or develop a technical mechanism for those remote border checks (neither of which is likely happening any time soon), you've simply got to decide which of Option #1 and #2 you can best live with for the time being.
To her credit (and I've not given her much credit on this thread), May has understood this and made the determination that Option #2 is the more palatable. But she's clearly completely failed to make that case to a large swathe of her party (and is never going to be able to make that case to the DUP). Labour doesn't want to leave the common market at all (I think). The minority parties don't want to leave the EU at all. So we're absolutely stuck.