It has always been plain that one potential solution to the Irish border problem is to have a regulatory and customs border between NI and GB.
This article rightly points out that it is hard to see why regulatory and customs checks at Irish Sea ports between NI and GB are problematic in principle: customs checks already exist between the Channel Islands/Isle of Man and GB, and some agri-checks between NI and GB.
And many countries have similar internal borders: Spain/Canaries. China/Hong Kong (and few countries are as jealous of their unity and sovereignty as China).
And, given that pro-hard Brexit thinking on customs and regulatory checks between U.K. and EU after Brexit is keen to emphasise ways in which those checks can be kept light-touch, the same must hold for NI/GB checks.
But I think that the issue of checks masks other problems, which aren’t really addressed here: the problems of divergence and governance.
The effect of the backstop will be to put NI (at least in relation to goods) into a different regulatory and customs regime from that of the U.K. Quite how different depends on the U.K./EU future relationship and choices made by the U.K.
Of course, since NI voted to remain, it may be said that there is no problem here: NI gets a variety of “remain”.
(The DUP object to that - but it can’t be emphasised too often that despite the distortions in Westminster representation caused by FPTP and SF non-attendance, the DUP are very much a minority in NI.)
And legal divergence between NI and GB is not problematic in itself. NI effectively governed itself, with very different laws, between 1922 and the 1970s (in which, among other things, it restricted free movement from the U.K.).
It is devolved now. And as we all know, NI law is still very different in many areas.
And it is also hard for those who say regulatory divergence and customs differences should not have a major effect on U.K.-EU trade to explain why they should unacceptably disrupt GB/NI trade.
I think the real problem with divergence is Scotland: if NI gets a sort of “remain” why shouldn’t 🏴 - which voted even more heavily remain - get it too? It’s hard to see a principled answer to that question.
And the other serious problem is governance and accountability. The problem there is that the backstop provides that large parts of EU law apply to NI - but NI will have no MEPs and no representation in EU law-making. That doesn’t seem to me to be sustainable in the long run./end
