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For what it's worth, a few thoughts on the backstop and why we shouldn’t be tripping over ourselves to bin it. A thread:
Peace in Northern Ireland is the biggest achievement in UK politics in last fifty years. The fruit of enormous effort and sacrifice. Successive UK governments have owned it, paying tribute along the way to the tough men and women who were big enough to compromise and do a deal.
The 1998 Belfast Agreement was always intended to be a living peace agreement with ongoing North-South economic cooperation built in. That happened within a unified framework of the Single Market & CU. The implications of Brexit for this were an afterthought at best in 2016.
In Dec 2017 we agreed to notion of a NI 'backstop’ as insurance policy that our proposed Brexit (Lancaster House) would do nothing to disrupt current patterns of economic & social life across the border.
Was clear then that the backstop would have some teeth. No one left government in protest. Joint Report hailed as a breakthrough moment in negotiations. Widely supported across Conservative party.
The final form of backstop in Withdrawal Agreement reflected a key UK demand that it should be a UK-wide arrangement rather than NI-specific. This was a concession we asked for and got. Backstop would kick in if no alternative arrangements found.
Rather than embrace the fruit of our efforts the backstop immediately slated as a trap concocted by (a) the tricky Irish to further unity aspirations and/or (b) malevolent Commission to keep UK locked into CU indefinitely & stop us doing trade deals.
9 weeks before we are due to leave the EU, the idea that our end-game strategy should now be built around proposal to gut the backstop from WA is just not in the real world & not consistent with “solemn commitment” to the people of NI.
Our reversal on backstop, along with mutterings about revisiting the Belfast Agreement or using No Deal threat to force Irish to compromise, just serves to underline the need for backstop in the first place. Backstop is about locking in something good amidst uncertainty.
