Hard to know if Boris Johnson or Theresa May is more to blame for Irish Sea border

If Theresa May had a “lightbulb moment” more than a year after the EU referendum had taken place, as Sam McBride relates on Saturday (‘A broken Whitehall which knew more about China than about NI,’ May 29, see link below) then that may have been in the late autumn of 2017 when she realised that the largely fabricated problems of the Irish land border could provide a pretext for her to give the CBI and other business pressure groups what they wanted over Brexit.

Mrs May is my MP, and I repeatedly pointed out that there was an easy solution to that supposedly intractable “conundrum”; that any problem which existed was actually a problem for the EU, rather than for the UK; but to show goodwill towards the Irish Republic and the EU we could pass and enforce a new law to regulate goods exports across the border.

There must have been a reason why she was not interested in that proposal in February 2018, nor at any subsequent time when it was presented in various different ways, nor q8 months later when a more highly developed proposal along broadly similar lines was published by the former EU Commission official Sir Jonathan Faull and two professors of law.

It is hard to say who is most to blame for the current debacle over the Northern Ireland Protocol, whether it is Theresa May with her desire to keep all of us under the economic thumb of the EU, or Boris Johnson who inherited the mess she had created and made it far worse by singling out Northern Ireland to be left behind when the rest of the UK escaped the orbit of EU law.

Dr DR Cooper, Maidenhead

• Sam McBride: A broken Whitehall which knew more about China than about NI

——— ———

A message from the Editor:

Thank you for reading this story on our website. While I have your attention, I also have an important request to make of you.

With the coronavirus lockdown having a major impact on many of our advertisers — and consequently the revenue we receive — we are more reliant than ever on you taking out a digital subscription.

Subscribe to newsletter.co.uk and enjoy unlimited access to the best Northern Ireland and UK news and information online and on our app. With a digital subscription, you can read more than 5 articles, see fewer ads, enjoy faster load times, and get access to exclusive newsletters and content. Visit https://www.newsletter.co.uk/subscriptions now to sign up.

Our journalism costs money and we rely on advertising, print and digital revenues to help to support them. By supporting us, we are able to support you in providing trusted, fact-checked content for this website.

Alistair Bushe

Editor