The Telegraph are excelling themselves this weekend with Brexit related articles. The PM kicks it off by telling us (HERE) she's going to 'battle for Britain in Brussels' presumably as opposed to battling for Brussels in Britain, as a lot of Telegraph readers think. Nobody has any faith in her so I'm not sure it makes any difference anyway. She is apparently going with new ideas on the Irish border although if it's the Malthouse compromise they look suspiciously like the old ideas the EU have repeatedly rejected.
Next, Liam Halligan has a mysterious article (HERE no£) which starts off on the front page with one headline and ends up when you click on it with another. The first is: Backstop: The politics and economics and why it's Varadkar who must back down. For some reason this becomes: The Backstop: The politics and economics, Brexit's most important, but most eminently solvable, riddle.
Varadkar isn't told to 'back down' in the second headline.
This is an attempt to keep up the narrative that the backstop is an EU plot to keep us inside the bloc, aided by extreme remainers (aka normal people) in the civil service and the cabinet.
Halligan is part Irish and claims a special attachment to and knowledge of Ireland and actually believes the conspiracy theory. He really thinks a lot of very smart people have spent eighteen months poring over the details unable to arrive at a solution that he thinks is obvious. His argument is:
"For the sad truth is this essentially technical problem is being exploited by an increasingly irate anti-Brexit coalition across the UK, Ireland and among Brussels Eurocrats. Their cynical judgment is that if fears about a return to The Troubles are whipped up enough, then the biggest expression of democracy in the history of these islands might yet be thwarted".
"There is no reason at all that the same invisible Irish land border coping with differing taxes cannot now handle minor post-Brexit differences in trading standards. Such variations, of course, would be even more marginal if the UK and EU got beyond this confected backstop nonsense and finally negotiated a free-trade agreement".
The backstop is 'confected nonsense' that could be solved by negotiating a FTA even though the EU say they have looked at every border on earth (HERE) and cannot find one that would keep things as they are while allowing different customs and regulatory regimes on either side.
Next to batter the backstop ramparts is Henry Newman of Open Europe and Vote Leave, who writes a second article (HERE) on precisely the same topic as Halligan. It as as if The Telegraph, unable to find quality arguments are opting for quantity, hoping to persuade the EU and Ireland to drop the backstop from the sheer exhaustion of reading so many articles arguing that it's not necessary.
All of this misses the point. I think the backstop is necessary but even if it wasn't, the EU can demand it remains in the WA simply because they can. The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must, as Thucydides noted in his history of the Peloponnesian wars.
The EU control the biggest, richest and closest market to us. We need access to it and will eventually have to conceded the backstop. This is how the world has always worked and will work post Brexit.
We have just changed roles that's all. Men like Newman and Halligan just haven't realised it yet.
