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I've come up with an "alternative arrangements" solution to the Irish backstop! Listen up because it's going to be good. It starts with something I call "CUSMexY", Which looks an acronym for something sexy because it is. It stands for ...
...Customs Union and Single Market for everything except Yachts. Basically, the starting point is the backstop, but both sides accept that trade in luxury yachts will be tariff free but not included in the SM, and the UK and Ireland are free to diverge on yacht regulation ...
So ... it is pretty intrinsic to the nature of yachts that they can be traded without crossing land borders. And the ownership of yachts is registered, so all VAT, duty and other issues can be dealt with away from borders or online. So CUSMexY satisfies all the GFA constraints.
Obviously, the purpose of CUSMexY is to establish that you can start from the backstop and carve out sectors as and when technological and administrative solutions can be found. Can we extend this? Well, a less obviously frivolous sector might be racehorses ...
Racehorses are extensively bred in Ireland and are actively traded with both the North and the rUK. But racehorses are also registered individually and have associated veterinary paperwork which is closely regulated. No problem at all in checks away from the border there ...
... so the UK can diverge from EU on non-tariff barriers in the racehorse market without any realistic risk of UK-bred noncompliant ringers turning up at Longchamps. That's two sectors in which I've regained sovereignty already! Make me chief negotiator!
Now, once we get past these obvious special cases, it becomes significantly harder. But come on, I hope nobody promised this would be *easy*! It's the backstop problem FFS! In principle, boxed supplies of pharmaceuticals are subject to track-and-trace regimes ...
... with individual randomised box-level barcodes. But this system isn't universally implemented and doesn't always work; there's still a substantial grey market and much more smuggling than yachts or racehorses. But ...
... where there's a will (and the UK would probably have to materially subsidise takeup by Irish traders), there could be a way to extend CUSMexY&R to CUSMexYR&Px. Beyond that ...
... well, beyond that, it's going to take a long time. It will depend on technology that hasn't been invented yet, and which in most cases won't ever be invented unless someone (that would be us) puts a lot of money into subsidising its invention. For a lot of sectors, it ...
... might never be worth bothering. But that's something for the UK, the two communities of Northern Ireland and the RoI to jointly decide what they're going to prioritise, based on how much they actually value sovereignty versus time and trouble. It might even be that ...
...the Northern Irish authorities ended up being unconvinced that the benefits of regulatory divergence and/or a different VAT regime on racehorses were not so great as to justify the complexity and loss of EU market share to their breeders ...
...That would be cool too. But the principle of sovereignty would be there; for any sector, the UK would be in control of how much time and trouble it wanted to spend on creating the conditions under which that sector could be removed from the backstop.
Now it might be objected "Danny, what you're describing is just the backstop. That's what the backstop is."
To which I would reply "don't tell me, tell them".
To which I would reply "don't tell me, tell them".
