The UK agreed to international-treaty level this year that it will do nothing under any circumstances which necessitate the reintroduction of an Irish border, not least because that would collapse the Good Friday Agreements.
Two weeks ago Theresa May tore it up.
Yes, the UK is an "unreliable partner". In its current regime of rule by imbeciles, there is no point negotiating with it nor coming to agreements with it, because the UK cannot be trusted to actually hold to those agreements from one month to the next.
The UK doesn't need a wall -- it could have an open border if it wants to (right?). It's Ireland that would have to enforce a border. Unless there is some other binding agreement at play.
The UK wanted to leave the EU and the common market. That means a border. That much has always been clear. That's basically the whole point of the common market.
The UK also doesn't want a border between Ireland and Northern Ireland but that's stricly an issue between the Republic of Ireland and the UK. Obviously as Ireland is a member and the EU is a constructive and diplomatically open entity, it was more than ready to negociate and multiple solutions have been proposed and tentivaly accepted before being reneged by the UK government.
I mean at some point in a negociation if the weak party can't come to its sense, you have to stop wasting everyone's time and tell them to get lost which is more or less what's happening with the UK.
The basic problem here is that the UK government decided that it definitely did not want to to follow EU regulations. That implies that there are at least two different regions of the world: those that follow UK regulations and those that follow EU regulations. So the places where these regions meet are a boundary. And both of these institutions have to decide how to handle trade across this boundary. You can either put this boundary between Northern Ireland and the rest of Ireland (ignoring some of the Good Friday accords) or put it between the NI and the rest of the UK.
My modest proposal would be to simply to join NI to the Irish nation.
There hasn't been a word from the UK government about how this could be achieved. There seems to be no realistic way to retain an open border with the Republic of Ireland while not having an open border with the rest of the EU. The mythical Romanian could just fly to Dublin, drive to NI and catch a ferry. The only solution that I can see is to move the border to the North Sea. An open border with the Republic, but border controls between NI and GB. I imagine that will go down like a cup of cold sick with a good proportion of the population of NI.
UK signed a deal for the Brexit. Now UK doesn't want to honor its part of the deal, aka give european (and french) fishermen the authorization required by the deal...
Moreover, Jersey limited the parts of the fishing zone to be less than what the Brexit deal was negociated...
So... how do you deal with a country that signed a treaty 5 month ago and doesn't want to respect it ???? Jersey is just "another brick in the wall"
It seems that the UK does not realize it should act vs. the EU as does Canada rather than how the UK did previously. The geographic proximity has little importance when borders are considered.
I’m no expert but it seemed that the big oversight in Brexit was that a war on UK’s border was put on hold in the 90’s due to the fact that the EU made borders within Europe pretty inconsequential. The backstop was Theresa May’s attempt at solving the problem of both having a border and not having a border, by basically not leaving the EU.
Talk of the EU “punishing” the UK is silly. The EU is not going to renegotiate a huge set of treaties (the leaving agreement) due to the fact that the UK can’t find a way to both have a border and not have a border. They just spent 2 years negotiating with the UK and now the UK has gotten cold feet.
The UK would have to agree on free movement like Norway and Switzerland to get the same deal, and that's the main thing they voted against. They never really had it anyways, getting into the UK has always felt more like the US border crossing. Good riddance.
"A common regulatory area comprising the Union and the United Kingdom in respect of Northern
Ireland
is hereby established. The common regulatory area shall constitute an area without internal
borders in which the free movement of goods is ensured and North
-
South cooperation protected in
accordance with this Chapter"
They're free to submit daft proposals all they like but until then this is the one that's been agreed on.
(That document lists Gibraltar and the various islands, but also one nobody's mentioned in the news so far: "Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia in Cyprus").
Thats because it was always up to the EU and never up to Ireland. It's an EU border effectively.
UK politicians before referendum pointed out that they were willing to preserve the CTA (common travel area between Ireland and UK) which predated -- but importantly doesn't supercede the EU. Irish politicians pointed this out but were largely ignored by UK press.
>It is the EU that will not allow it.
I suspect you're alluding that this is somehow the EU's fault. It really isn't -- and the finger points 100% at the UK. There are treaties and agreements going back decades including for instance the Good Friday Agreement on which all peace in N.Ireland is largely credited. The lack of a border is mandated by this international and binding agreement which UK seems happy to simply ignore.
Because unless the UK and the EU reach a trade agreement by the end of the year, the provisions of the Withdrawal Agreement kick in and Northern Ireland becomes bound to EU regulation.
This is a long and complicated story, but essentially Brexit created the following problem: the UK now desires to have full control over its borders, and this means a hard border between the UK and the EU. But then there is also the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), which achieved peace between the unionists (Protestants who want NI to be part of the UK) and the nationalists (Catholics who want NI to be part of Ireland). Simplistically, the GFA guarantees a sort of double affiliation of NI, both to the UK and to Ireland. This means, among other things, no physical borders.
The negotiations and the deal were extremely dumb in many ways (as is Brexit overall), but this is a really weird take on it. It does make sense that Britain would try to use the fact that Ireland has a substantial amount of trade with the UK and it is not inconceivable that Ireland might therefore in its own self-interest want some sort of deal.
In fact, they signed up for exactly that not even 2 years ago.
It seems, though, that they were just kicking the can down the road and never really had intentions to live up to their side of the deal.
Global Britain! Yeah, right...
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