Daniel Hannan, the arch Brexiteer, was on Channel 4 News yesterday and spouting the usual nonsense. He said the British government had published position papers on variety topics, include the Irish border, in "granular detail". I doubt if one person in a hundred listening to him would have read any of the papers and would believe this was true. It isn't. The Irish border paper is a typical example. It simply sets out some principles and nothing else.
There are no "granular details". In fact there aren't details of any kind, granular or otherwise.
Consider one small item. This is in paragraph 47 which says one of the measures to be considered is to "negotiate a continued waiver from the requirement to submit entry and exit summary declarations for goods being moved between the UK and the EU, removing a time sensitive administrative requirement".
So, the UK government's answer to the border problem can be summarised like this. We want to leave the single market and the customs union but have the EU behave as if we are still in both. It is a fantasy rather than a proposal in "granular detail".
The problem is easy to set out but the difficulty can be seen in the fact that after five negotiating rounds there are no proposals. The paper talks a lot about "flexible and imaginative" solutions and comes close to suggesting the EU should come up with ideas. The EU have firmly rejected this and put the onus on the UK to provide workable solutions but we haven't - well, not beyond the secretive and very right wing Legatum Institute suggesting air ships are used to patrol the border. These are no doubt flexible and imaginative - but workable? No. Laughable.
