To understand the sheer scale of the problem we have in resolving the NI protocol have a look below at part of a Twitter exchange between Sir Christopher Meyer, former UK ambassador to the USA and Mrs May’s chief of staff Gavin Barwell. Meyer is a strong Brexiteer, almost as if he’s in the pay of a foreign power. He tweets that in regard to the Irish border issue we (Theresa May) should have told the EU to ‘sort it' with Dublin.
Quite apart from the fact that reasonable people don't create huge problems for their neighbours and then walk away telling them to 'sort it' Mr Meyer, as a former ambassador to The White House, should have known more than anyone that the Americans helped to negotiate the Good Friday Agreement and were co-guarantors of it.
This is his tweet sent on Saturday at 11.19 am:
In all the fury over Article 16 one thing is forgotten. The UK should never have accepted in the first place the avoidance of a hard border as our problem. It was always the EU’s-to protect the Single Market. We should have said: it’s your problem, you sort it. We don’t want one.
— Christopher Meyer (@SirSocks) November 13, 2021
Later, in the afternoon, at 4.13 pm Barwell responds:
You say you don't want a border @SirSocks but unless you want to be in a customs union + partial regulatory alignment with the EU then actually you do. A border is the logical consequence of a Canada style relationship. You can't just wish it away https://t.co/2sX55h0uLf
— Gavin Barwell (@GavinBarwell) November 13, 2021
Meyer comes back at 7.36pm and asks Barwell to “Kindly show me where I say I don’t want a border.”
Kindly show me, @GavinBarwell , where I say I don’t want a border. We have one, bequeathed by the Good Friday Agreement. That’s my kind of border. But Merkel demanded something far harder and you lot, instead of telling the EU to sort it with Dublin, let yourselves be bullied. https://t.co/87RTbvlyOn
— Christopher Meyer (@SirSocks) November 13, 2021
Half an hour later, to show an example of where Meyer has said he doesn't want a border, Barwell responds, quoting Meyers own tweet from the morning which he finishes with, “….We don’t want one [a border].”
"The UK should never have accepted in the first place the avoidance of a hard border as our problem...We don’t want one" You can't have the border bequeathed by the GFA if the UK is outside the SM and/or CU
— Gavin Barwell (@GavinBarwell) November 13, 2021
It looks as if Meyer suffers from serious dementia where he keeps forgetting what he has said just hours before. This is often a fault in Brexiteers.
My mother-in-law and sister-in-law both had the same sort of problem and spent the last couple of years of their lives in a specialist care homes. I met quite a lot of people in them just like Sir Christopher. They had no memory of what they had said minutes earlier or sometimes even who you were.
Meyer also conveniently forgets that it was the single market and the customs union that made the Good Friday Agreement possible, as Barwell points out. As for blaming Mrs Merkel for wanting a hard border, this ignores the pressure Theresa May was under to go for the hardest possible Brexit which means a physical border must go somewhere.
The British government may not want a border but the EU, Ireland and the US do. And it’s very odd for a country not to want a border, especially one struggling to control the entry of refugees. What is Priti Patel up to in The Channel?
How can a territory be governed if anything can enter it at anytime unchecked? What would be the point of banning something if it could be imported illegally without any border formalities?
If Meyer actually believes what he says, I assume he might be relying on some magical solution, away from the border, using drones and super computers to achieve it. But the NI-Ireland border is 300 miles long with multiple crossing points. Dover-Calais has just one but nobody is suggesting the same thing there. May and Barwell proposed staying in the SM and the CU until this high tech solution was found and the Brexiteers demonstrated how much confidence they themselves had in their own idea by getting rid of both of them.
You can see the contradictions of Brexit in Meyer’s plan compared to Priti Patel the beleaguered Home Secretary who is struggling to prevent the flow of migrants across The Channel and I assume Meyer does want a border with France? Or do we throw the doors open? Johnson has apparently called for France to close its border with Belgium to reduce the number of migrants using France as a staging post.
We don't want a border with Ireland while demanding France close their border with Belgium! What hypocrisy.
Meyer, like Johnson, wants borders where he likes but not one where he doesn’t like. He argues to have no border when it suits him and forgets what he's said a few minutes later. He wants no border for goods but a border for people with France. With Ireland he doesn't want a border for people or goods. This is taking Britain’s have cake and eat it attitude to new heights.
It is an illusion that you can have such a thing but perhaps no more of an illusion that high tech invisible borders exist or that Brexit will be good for us. It won’t.
Brexit and the NI protocol will not be solved until people face facts. Meyer is one of those Brexiteers who are impervious to reality. He is like the person in the meeting who never has any realistic suggestions to resolve problems and only puts forward outlandish ideas that everyone else ignores.
Unfortunately, we have had rather a lot of them involved in Brexit but they are getting fewer and fewer.
