Why should we give in to EU blackmail over the EU border?

In deference to public exhaustion, I’ve largely avoided Brexit in this slot. But a columnist’s output ought rightly to echo what she shouts at the television news. Big picture, the UK may have made an utter Horlicks of its putative withdrawal from the European Union because Britain should never have come to the EU with a begging bowl in the first place. Walking out first and reverting coolly to WTO rules, the UK might have negotiated from a position of strength. You don’t slap a party in the face, only to implore that same party for special favours while his face is still smarting. Big surprise, the strategy has been unavailing.

Hindsight aside, the biggest mistake the UK continues to make is to naively accept the EU’s opening construct. As I noted in November, rather than rejecting outright the legitimacy of any ‘divorce bill’, when the UK has been a generous net contributor for nearly all of its 40 years’ membership, Theresa May immediately leapt to haggle over how much. This government has consistently failed to question the underlying assumptions on which differences of opinion are founded. The EU has been setting the terms. The terms are all.

So let’s look at this Irish border matter. We’re given to believe that there absolutely mustn’t be a ‘hard border’ between Northern Ireland and the Republic. Thus we have May and her minions disappearing up their own arses trying to define what exactly constitutes this ‘hard border’ and anguishing about whether cameras count. An absence of ‘infrastructure’ along a boundary that, in legal terms, is already about as hard as it can get — between two entirely different countries — is ‘enshrined’ (that would be the EU and its Irish lapdog’s worshipful adjective of choice, enshrined) in the Good Friday Agreement.