The EU's backstop is not an insurance policy but a trap (Roger Kendrick in BrexitCentral, 22 October.)
"The backstop is not an insurance policy which will never be needed or used. It is an ingenious device developed by the EU to create a comprehensive lock on the future trade and regulatory policy of the UK thereby ensuring that the UK would be under the absolute control of the EU and ECJ and could never effectively compete with the EU. The EU's negotiating strategy is brilliant and the UK would be the suckers. With any form of effective backstop, the UK would become a powerless vassal state with no negotiating position in terms of trade or any other policies that the EU chose to impose and the £39 billion would have been committed irrevocably."
The EU has weaponised the Irish border issue, and Theresa May completely fell into the trap. She has told Leo Varadkar that she accepts the EU's demands that any fall-back border solution cannot be 'time-limited'. She made the admission in a meeting with the Taioseach just hours before telling other leaders that she would consider extending the transition period. Mr Varadkar said, "We all recognise that it can't be time-limited in the sense that it can't have an expiry date."
The following is an extract from Chapter 6 of my book, Brexit: the road to freedom.
The long-established Anglo-Irish Common Travel Area, which goes back to 1923, is a matter exclusively for the British and Irish governments and is not an EU matter. Irish people will continue to move freely between the two islands and across the North-South border in Ireland as they have always done. [i] The report's author is the EU's own customs expert, Lars Karlsson, the former Director of World Customs Organization, and Deputy Director General of Swedish Customs. This study identified international standards, best practices and technologies that could be used to avoid a 'hard' border as well as case studies that provided insights into creating a smooth border experience. Modern technology means that borders do not need physical customs posts, not even cameras. Karlsson envisaged the use of mobile phone and GPS technology to track HGVs, together with the computer-based customs clearing which is the norm across much of the world. Karlsson stated that this would be 'a border without any new infrastructure… what you would describe as a frictionless border'. This solution offered a template for future UK-EU border relationships.
The National Audit Office reported in June 2018, "HMRC expects it will take a further three months to scale up the operational CHIEF [Customs Handling of Import and Export Freight] system. If it successfully completes this work, HMRC should have the system capacity to handle customs declarations no matter what the outcome of negotiations between the UK and the EU. HMRC is confident that CHIEF will be able to handle the increased volume of declarations, and that it remains a reliable system that is suitable for a short term contingency arrangement."[ii]
Annual EU-Switzerland trade was a hundred times greater than Northern Ireland-Republic of Ireland trade, yet the many Swiss border crossings to the EU were often completely unmanned, despite Switzerland being in neither the EU's single market nor its customs union. In 2012 the Swiss estimated that their total EU-Switzerland border costs were just 0.1 per cent of trade value. Border frictions were non-existent because their products met EU standards.
The US and Canada were not in a customs union, yet more goods crossed the US/Canadian border each year than did the EU's external border - with no delays. In the port of Felixstowe, there is not a customs officer in sight, yet it handles £80 billion of trade a year - £77 billion more than the Irish border - without a hitch. They use a tried-and-tested digital cargo-tracking system developed in Felixstowe, known as Destin8, which has worked so well for more than a decade that it processed most of the non-EU maritime trade coming into this country. So there would be no need for checkpoints or customs officials at the border.
A poll taken on 29-31 May 2018 found that, if people had to choose between leaving the customs union and avoiding a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, 41 per cent in Great Britain said they would leave the customs union, 32 per cent said they would stay to avoid a hard border, and 27 per cent didn't know.[iii] Three quarters of Conservatives and Leave voters in Great Britain agreed that the border issue was being "deliberately exaggerated by politicians and others to suit their own political agenda."[iv] The EU was indeed trying to use nationalists in Scotland and Ireland to break Britain apart.
Taoiseach [i] [ii] The Customs Declaration Service: a progress update, HC 1124 Session 2017–2019, 28 June 2018
[iii] Lord Ashcroft, Brexit, the border and the Union, Lord Ashcroft Polls, June 2018, p. 6.
[iv] Lord Ashcroft, Brexit, the border and the Union, Lord Ashcroft Polls, June 2018, p. 6.