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Here is the big intellectual problem underlying a lot of what we're hearing from the UK today. It seems that a lot of people there assume that an absence of borders is the natural state of affairs & that borders are a weird aberration. The assumption is false.
As a cursory glance around the world will confirm borders are the natural state of affairs. Their absence is the aberration. You basically only have sovereign states coexisting without borders within the EU and that is because getting rid of them was the EU's great project.
The EU got rid of borders by having its member states share enough sovereignty that borders were no longer required, since those countries shared the same external trade policy, VAT regime and rules regarding product standards.
This is the only way that borders have been eliminated anywhere. It is a stunning achievement. It has been so successful that many Europeans today have forgotten the days when we had borders and may even assume that you never need them. Many Europeans including fervent Brexiteers
And so they argue that the UK can do whatever it wants on trade and regulation without this having implications for borders. That the UK will never introduce a border with Ireland. That if UK decisions lead to borders, this will be because the EU 'chooses' to 'reintroduce' them.
These claims might be valid if we lived in a world where the absence of borders was the natural state of affairs. Since we don't live in such a world the claims are a logical nonsense and will remain so until someone finds an alternative to the EU's border-busting recipe (CU+SM).
And there is no sign that anyone has done so yet, or will do any time soon, given that we also live in a world in which legitimate traders and taxpayers quite reasonably won't accept being ripped off by criminals illegally smuggling goods across frontiers.
(Law and order, the ability to finance public expenditure, and basic fairness tend to matter to people. The Tories need to remember this when discussing issues relating to borders with people from the rest of Europe.)
If you get rid of the arrangements that allowed borders to be removed in the first place then they will return as an automatic consequence of your decisions. Yours and no-one else's. It really is as simple as that.
However, none of this will stop many in the UK from claiming that the backstop is not required to avoid a hard border, that in a no deal scenario you wouldn't need one anyway, that if there are checks on UK goods at Calais this will constitute 'punishment', etc etc.
And while many making such claims are just being dishonest there are probably others who are genuinely confused. And one reason for that is that they've so internalised the EU's greatest success that they assume that it is the natural state of affairs.
Which is wrong and also a bit ironic.
