As I was saying - entangled or walk away?

A good column by Dominic Lawson in yesterday's Sunday Times, "Careful, Taoiseach: we could just walk away" and subtitled "Leo Varadkar's exploitation of the key Brexit issue could backfire badly". Of course, I say that because it's basically a better written and argued version of a number of my blogs since September, in particular Reasons to be Cheerful - or Entangled? (8 December, in which I expressed concern about the text concerning Ireland in the joint report on the first phase of the negotiations) and Don't Walk Away Renee (17 September, in which I said every party to a negotiation has to have its 'walk away' points, or it may just get drawn inexorably into a bad deal).

Summarising Lawson's points, he says

• Theresa May foolishly conceded on 'sequencing', agreeing up front to the divorce bill without a comittment for a trade deal in return. Lawson says that, in Brussels, the 'bloody difficult woman', as she has delighted in calling herself, is known as 'Madame No - until she says yes'
• The EU has ruthlessly exploited the Irish border issue, spuriously citing the Good Friday agreement, to get Mrs May to abandon the aim of taking the UK out of the customs union and single market. (Lawson notes this is spurious because the open border preceded the Good Friday agreement by 5 years)
• He reminds us that the deputy director general of Swedish customs reported that reliance on technology should be sufficient for the Irish border
• There are significant differences in income tax, VAT and excise duty which are currently managed without checks at the Irish border, a situation that has been maintained by close contact between British and Irish officials. But the Republic has ceased much of that co-operation. Work by Irish civil servants on an electronic border was stopped and meetings with Northern Irish officials cancelled
• He alleges Taoiseach Varadkar's motives are personal and political. He needs to be seen to be sufficiently 'green' (anti-British in an Irish context) and has ambitions to become Ireland's first president of the European council
• The EU side can just keep saying 'non' to our border proposals because we signed up to the fallback of 'alignment'. Lawson, being classically educated, says this is like Achilles in Zeno's paradox - we move as quickly as we can to try to catch up with the EU tortoise, but never get there. Having been trained to design chemical plants (and therefore watch football, drink beer and listen to rock music) my analogy was the lyric from Genesis's Entangled
• Labour's position that it is necessary to remain only in a customs union to solve the Irish border issue is tosh. The EU has said that leakage of non-compliant goods must be prevented. This is a single market, not a tariff-related customs union, issue
• But staying in the customs union would make a nonsense of 'Brexit means Brexit'. Therefore, in the limit, May may just walk away, causing far more damage to the Republic than the Northern Ireland or the rest of the UK.

I said as much back in September. We may have to walk away to make them call us back in a more compliant mood. If they don't, it's not clear to me why we are worse off.

Lawson hopes May made the point to Varadkar (or the smirking tea-shuk, as I called him in December) when they met on Thursday.

When Lawson describes Varadkar's position as green in an Irish context, I am sure what he means is it is an attempt to lever Northern Ireland towards a united Ireland and away from the United Kingdom. That is, of course, a valid political objective but I consider using Brexit for that purpose unprincipled. Especially when the use of cameras already deployed in monitoring the border is branded unworkable, as the Irish/EU contingent seem to be saying.

So, what should we do? Put it like this. Faced with a menacing gang of, say, 27 thugs what should you do? A good tactic is to pick on one of the weaker ones. That is Ireland. They need a deal more than we do. So we say we are walking away unless they get committed to sorting the border issue by one of our proposed solutions. We have to make Ireland choose between max fac and hard border/ WTO rules. When Ireland say it works, Barnier has nowhere to go.

But we must mean it: we walk away from all the negotiations until sense breaks out. I know that the use of technology in the ways and on the scale proposed for the Irish border is untested and, where trusted trader schemes similar to that proposed are deployed they are limited in scope and do not remotely produce what could be called frictionless trade. But guess what? The trade across the Irish border is so limited that it doesn't really matter. It's a perfect candidate to pilot such a scheme and iron out the problems. It's really only needed for the benefit of the local population.

Oh and if this doesn't work we pick on some of the other smaller EU countries as well. Just because they are in the EU doesn't mean we can't apply selective sanctions to them post Brexit. These could be completely arbitrary but designed to randomly hurt. No students allowed from country X for example. Remember if the EU retaliate it hurts them more than us in total, though I accept there is some asymetry: our exports to the EU are nearly half our total whereas for any individual EU nation their exports to us probably represent less than 10% of their total. It is a mutually assured destruction that won't happen - provided we are prepared to use it. Yes, we need to think of it in the same way as for a nuclear deterrent.

Basically we need to start standing up for ourselves and showing we won't just cave in. Though that is what we have been doing so far.

After all, there is no point whatsoever in staying in the Hotel California, checked out but never leaving. The reason I am adamant about that is this: if we stay in a customs union, or the single market, via the EEA or another mechanism, as well as not really being 'out' we condemn ourselves to a situation that is definitely worse than being a full EU member. While no nation state has total freedom in the modern global economy, a customs union would inhibit or indeed prevent the UK from achieving its potential as an international trading and financial centre. I accept we might not be better off than being in the EU. But I am confident that we could be. It would be up to us.

While there is a short term argument that we would be better of in a customs union this is a temporary transitional issue. I didn't fancy the transition which is why I voted Remain. But if we are leaving it makes no sense at all to me to bind ourselves to the EU more than is necessary.

Many folk who want us to stay in a customs union actually just want us to stay in the EU. As with the Irish issue, that is a valid political ambition. But what none of them say is they want to keep us as close as possible, part way in, to facilitate rejoining. That, of course, is because - however you count it - around half the population think 'leave means leave'.

Over to you Mrs May. You've got a nuclear button but the other side have to be made to realise you will use it.