This article (HERE) in The Telegraph says it all about the British attitude to Ireland. The writer, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, is not only ignorant of the facts he is a hypocrite to boot. In it he puts the blame for the Irish border problem squarely on Dublin as if it's nothing to do with us!
The Irish government is criticised for threatening to veto the move to trade talks in December because, as they see it, there has been insufficient progress on solving the border conundrum - the one that Britain created by opting to leave the customs union and the single market.
Mr Evans-Pritchard says:
"Yet Mr Varadkar has made his choice. He has ditched his predecessor’s call for a formula that finesses the border issue with modern technology, demanding that there should be no change whatsoever to the status quo. 'We want taken off the table any suggestion that there will be a physical border, a hard border, new barriers to trade on the island of Ireland,' he said".
But this is the British government's own position - that a hard border will not be allowed. Johnson has repeatedly said the same thing, that nothing will change. Ireland are simply asking us how that will work in practice. Either we have a solution or we don't. He goes on:
"[Mr Varadkar] insists that the trade frontier should shift to the Irish sea, regardless of the economic facts. Ulster’s exports to the rest of the UK are 22pc of GDP, four times its shipments to Ireland. Mr Varadkar is pushing a purely political and geographic claim. By opening this chapter he has aroused suspicions that EU Brexit policy is a stalking horse for a united Ireland."
The EU suggestion that the border move to the Irish sea is surely perfectly easy? It will use a "formula that finesses the border issue with modern technology" to use the writer's own words that he used without irony in his article, and be frictionless - just like the one he and the British government is proposing between NI and the Republic. We try to minimise all the land border problems but all the reasons we advance in support of it could equally be used to support a sea border within the UK. But with the added advantage that we would control both sides. The volume of trade is less important if modern technology is used surely?
And Ireland didn't "open this chapter" we did by voting to leave the EU. Note how this is taken as read, that we had the right to do as we please even if this causes great hardship to a neighbour. When the neighbour proposes to take a sovereign decision that causes us difficulties there are howls of protest. The hypocrisy stinks to high heaven.
