The Sun are reporting (HERE) that David Davis has devised a clever new idea, to solve the Irish border question by having both UK and EU regulations apply in Northern Ireland and introducing a 10 mile wide buffer zone along the 300 mile border. It is said to based on a scheme used by Lichtenstein, a tiny country with a population of less than 40,000, and was apparently an idea floated by Shankar Singman while he was at The Legatum Institute, a shadowy right wing think tank, which has just been admonished by The Charities Commission for being political (HERE).
It's not clear to me if the dual regulatory regime (called Max Fac 2) would operate across the whole of the province or just in the 10 mile buffer zone, which is being called a special economic zone. Anyway, I'm not sure if this new scheme would work or not since I don't see what difference it makes. The question, even with a buffer zone and operating a dual regulation system, is how do you prevent goods and items of plant and animal origin that do not meet EU standards, crossing into the EU? The report itself says factories would need to operate two production lines for example and it admits it is "tremendously complicated".
The EU accept that Lichtenstein has a slightly odd status since (a) it's very small and (b) it's surrounded totally by EU members so it's almost impossible for goods from other third countries - chlorinated chicken for example - to enter the EU. Northern Ireland couldn't guarantee this for a second. Moreover, it might create a complicated precedent for other EU borders. So, I don't believe the EU will accept it for a moment. It won't be a "hard sell" as The Sun says, it will be impossible.
There is also the small matter of getting this past the DUP, the PSNI (Police Service of Northern Ireland) and even the Scottish government, worried as they are about NI getting an unfair advantage. It also is aimed at solving the Irish border issue - what about Dover?
It is perhaps a measure of the difficulty and the problems of Brexit that our negotiators are having to dream up ever more convoluted plans to achieve something that looks exactly what we have at the moment. This is perhaps the message of Brexit, it is achieving the status quo by more ever more expensive and complex solutions that barely anyone can understand and even fewer will be able to operate after Brexit.
And the "tremendously complicated" Max Fac 2 comes nine months after Max Fac 1 was dismissed as "magical thinking". What have we been doing?
