Simon Jenkins is right (Only a border in the Irish Sea could resolve this Brexit mess, Journal, 23 August). To sell this to the people, Boris Johnson would need to present it as a victory. The compromise would be for the EU to postpone the backstop to the end of the two-year transition period – Johnson could sell this as them removing the backstop from the withdrawal agreement (even though it would not have come into effect till then anyway). That gives the Brexiters about 18 months to come up with workable alternative arrangements. In return, the UK would agree to hold a referendum in Northern Ireland to choose between the alternative arrangements and the backstop (ie staying in the single market and customs union).
If the people voted for the backstop, no one could say this was anti-democratic. If they chose the alternative arrangements, we’d be no worse off than today, but we would have had two years to transition from the EU, and other agreements in Theresa May’s deal would stand. If this was put to parliament before 31 October, even if the DUP voted against it, enough MPs would support it as an alternative to a feared no deal. Winners all round!
Susanne MacGregor
London
Simon Jenkins thinks the Good Friday agreement is compatible with a sea border between Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom. Despite his support for the agreement, he appears to know nothing of the principle of consent, or the cogent and well-informed argument of Lords Trimble and Bew that it is the backstop which threatens the agreement.
Jenkins thinks Northern Ireland could remain in the United Kingdom with a sea border, but reveals his real purpose in his last paragraph. He wants the Brexit crisis to steer all of Ireland “towards a stable and contented union”. But one lesson of Brexit is that the process of leaving a union of fewer than 50 years has been extraordinarily difficult; leaving a union that is 200 years old – and which involves a far greater degree of economic and administrative connection – would be infinitely harder.
Colin Armstrong
Belfast
Simon Jenkins is doing his Theresa May impression: “A border is a border, wherever located” sounds a bit like “Brexit means Brexit”. Does he really think that the Norwegian-Russian border is no different from the Norwegian-Swedish one?
Sabine Weyand, pouring cold water on attempts to find a solution, may be “the EU tariff expert”, but she knows far less about borders than Tony Smith, a former director general of the UK Border Force, who has been repeatedly frustrated in his attempts to get the EU to consider sensible proposals. He has said that “any agreement around border transformation is entirely achievable with the collaborative will of the countries on either side of it”. The problem is that the EU doesn’t have that will, and too many in the UK who are hostile to Brexit are encouraging its intransigence.
Andrew Anderson
Edinburgh
Simon Jenkins thinks he clears up the mess: “some border arrangement down the Irish Sea”, “some continued customs link to Ireland, explicitly separate from the rest of the UK”, “Northern Ireland would remain in the United Kingdom”, though it “might be drawn more into the orbit of the south”. This sort of woolly thinking is what drives our European friends and partners to distraction. He mentions Scotland once, as being entitled to self-determination. Scotland voted 62% to remain. So will it just be England and Wales leaving? Is that what a non-messy Brexit is?
Tom Swallow
Kenilworth, Warwickshire
Simon Jenkins is correct in identifying the DUP as the real stumbling block to a solution to the backstop impasse. An arrangement that would see a border in the Irish Sea would reflect the will of a majority of people in Northern Ireland and be consistent with the DUP’s selective willingness to deviate from the UK in matters of social policy.
The DUP’s typical narrowness in its interpretation of a border in the Irish Sea, as an attack on unionism, is contradicted by the existence of the guarantees in the Belfast/Good Friday agreement. The agreement is a backstop on the backstop. Guaranteed by both governments, it protects unionism, and the guarantees mean no change to the status of Northern Ireland without the consent of a majority of the people in Northern Ireland.
It would be ironic if the DUP’s ill-considered position under its present leadership – in support of Brexit at any cost – actually undermined the unionist position in the longer term, with the prospect of a border poll following a no-deal Brexit.
Declan McGonagle
Redcastle, Co Donegal, Ireland
Matthew O’Toole (Boris Johnson is playing politics with Northern Ireland’s ‘delicate balance’, 22 August) attributes nationalist alienation to “the fact that their consent was never asked for in either the partition of Ireland or the character of Northern Ireland”. Had such consent been sought it would never have been forthcoming.
Northern Ireland was established as a Protestant state for a Protestant people and was supported as such by successive British governments. It systematically discriminated against its Catholic community who, when they sought the most basic of civil rights, were denied, often brutally. The Troubles resulted.
It was not until 1993 when the British government declared that it had “no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland” that the pathway to peace and the Belfast agreement of 1998 was truly laid down.
Theresa May’s deal in 2017 with the DUP breached Major’s commitment, and Johnson’s utterly partisan approach to the backstop risks doing further untold damage to this hard-won peace.
Andy Buck
Sheffield
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