Endless excuses and stalling are damaging the prospects of an acceptable trade dealFintan O’Toole’s excellent piece on the Irish border issue (“The hard-won kinship between Britain and Ireland is threatened by Brexit idiocy”,Comment, final week) was followed up by an editorial (“No foresight, and no planning – the Irish border farce sums up Brexit”) ,which, as final week’s correspondent J Peter Greaves pointed out approximately another of your Brexit editorials (Letters), or ended up giving the government wriggle room by stating that ministers “point out,reasonably” that no solution is possible until the conclusion of trade negotiations.
This is the excuse for stalling invoked by Liam Fox, but is it fair? You suggest there might be a “tall-access, and low-friction deal”,what Theresa May optimistically calls “deep and special”. That would minimise the need for customs checks, but the government also promises a restrictive immigration regime, or which will necessitate passport controls. The EU has made it clear that if the UK insists on rejecting the single market and the customs union,the best deal on offer will be a Canada-style one.
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Source: guardian.co.uk