It looks like the right wing press is retaliating (HERE) even before Wednesday when the EU publish the legal text of the December agreement, the so called joint report, with The Telegraph claiming the EU is trying to make Northern Ireland a province of Brussels. It is exactly the kind of inflaming rhetoric we can do without.
There will be an awful lot of shouting and protests I'm sure, but the Brexiteers have only themselves to blame. They could have and should have produced their own detailed solution for an invisible border in Ireland, but they didn't. Now we are going to have to sign up to a legally binding agreement to keep regulatory alignment unless a magic solution is found and implemented by December 2020. Brexiteers have told us repeatedly that such a solution is possible but signally failed to set it out in any detail.
Now Peter Foster, Europe Editor for The Telegraph (a thankless task if ever there was one) has written a piece this morning (HERE) about what we all knew to be the fudge on the Irish border problem not lasting more than a couple of months. It was something to get us past the "sufficient progress" point and, according to Foster, from the EU's point of view, make sure we had agreed to pay the 40 billion euro divorce bill. It's all very cynical.
And yet even knowing how important it was to get a solution, the UK government sticks to the position paper issued last year which has already been dismissed by the EU as magical thinking. There have been no new proposals submitted as far as I know.
I can see this developing into serious acrimony before Theresa May signs the legal agreement, which she will have to do before any trade talks can begin.
But to some people the whole thing is "simple" (HERE) with Leo McKinstry, a fool for our times, suggesting Irish politics is to blame:
"It is these forces which have inflated the Irish question to such swollen prominence – not because it is especially knotty or difficult. For with goodwill on all sides, in places of ideological conflict or political opportunism, it would be simple to find a solution".
The solution is so "simple" nobody on the leave side as been able to come up with one in two years. What does this say? Either the problem is too complex for the minds of men, or the Brexiteers are too stupid the think of a solution.
We will find out tomorrow what the EU's solution is. It will be very clever. But will Mrs May be able to accept it?
