The backstop will weaken UK’s hand in trade talks with EU

One of the most problematic proposals, the Irish backstop, has now been around so long that its implications have sunk in — and are so problematic as to have brought EU-UK relations to the brink of collapse.

In the same way that it is elementary that if Britain rules out a ‘no deal’ departure from the EU, it weakens its negotiating hand, so too if Britain accepts the backstop now it weakens its negotiating position on trade.

Supporters of the backstop say that it is temporary and will never need to be invoked and so on, but that misses a fundamental point. The backstop is in fact an outline of a situation that will always be the baseline for relations.

For Northern Ireland this means, in effect, always staying in the EU single market and customs union, and Great Britain staying in or close to the latter but with some possibility of being allowed to leave it ultimately.

All this is obvious, yet its obviousness did not prevent business leaders in Northern Ireland endorsing the backstop. Martin Howe QC, an expert lawyer, has confirmed to MPs that the backstop means the EU will have no incentive to offer a fundamentally different long-term arrangement to the UK, knowing it can fall back on the backstop.

Leo Varadkar is now saying that if there is no deal, a border can be avoided by full alignment between the UK and Ireland.

It is very possible, perhaps even likely, that London would be foolish enough to agree this, certainly between Northern Ireland and the EU. But that would then create the utterly absurd situation that the UK would go through all the trauma and downsides of ‘no deal’ and yet would still fully ally itself, or part of its territory, to an EU from which it was entirely shut out. The least London can do is say that if Dublin’s insistence on a backstop leads to ‘no deal’ then it cannot be sure now what would follow.