Showing posts with label northern ireland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label northern ireland. Show all posts

Friday, 2 March 2018

Brexit - the sonic screwdriver approach


Michel Barnier, walking the border
between Ireland and Northern Ireland
with representatives of the Irish government
One of the big questions raised by this week's draft withdrawal agreement (and a hundred documents and meetings before it) is "How do we avoid a return to the borders of the past?". Or, as it's normally put now: "How do we avoid a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland?". All sides have stated that they want the border to continue to be as open as it is today and, as we know, if "everybody wants it" and "it's in everybody's interests" then it will happen.

Theresa May was interrogated on the subject by the House of Commons Liaison Committee - a daunting assembly of the chairs of all the Commons select committees (though there are usually only about a dozen of them on any particular occasion). As the Times reported, "Asked about her government’s plans to avoid a hard border the British prime minister refused to rule out the use of cameras to monitor people and goods between the Republic and the North". But then "Pressed by Yvette Cooper, a senior Labour MP and chairwoman of the home affairs committee, on whether she could confirm numberplate recognition would not be used, Mrs May said: 'We have said that there will be no physical infrastructure in relation to Northern Ireland. We have put forward a number of suggestions as to how we think that border issue can be addressed'".


Those suggestions can be found in papers issued last summer on customs arrangements and specifically Northern Ireland and Ireland. A major suggestion for the border is what's usually referred to as "technology", which is taken to mean online registration of shipments, with VAT and customs duties being treated as an accounting process, plus the recognition of the largest companies as "trusted traders" who are assumed not to need stopping for customs checks.

That doesn't cover everyone of course, and former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern sums the scheme up as follows (see Give the impression of doing no work until it's far too late): "Our economy is relatively small, a huge amount of the trade is multinationals; it should be possible, I think, to do that by technology," Then: "But of course, when you come down to agriculture and smaller items, I don’t think technology would work. One thing we do not want, can’t have, is back to a physical border.” And then: "Theresa May, take her at her word, she’s confidently said she doesn't want a physical border, the EU don’t want a physical border, the Irish Government don’t. So you’re left down with the one alternative — to make technology work in most cases and to throw a blind eye to those areas that can’t come in within technology". The number of border crossings which would have to attract the blind eye (though obviously not the volume or value of goods in transit) has been estimated at 80%.

 The proposals have been rejected as inadequate, unworkable or "magical thinking" by the Irish government and EU negotiators, probably because there is little detail. Brexiters pour scorn on this, accusing everybody of just being negative. After all, they say, other countries have frictionless borders - look at Switzerland and its neighbours, Norway and Sweden, Canada and the USA. They don't always recognise that Switzerland has free movement and is in the Schengen zone (people cross borders as well as goods) and has a raft of bilateral agreements replicating much of the single market and easing customs. Neither do they mention that both Norway and Sweden are inside the single market. And how frictionless are those borders anyway?



That's a border post. You know, the kind that nobody wants on the Irish border. "Zollabfertigung" means "customs clearance". The evidence that Hoey and the rest of the committee heard from the head of Swiss customs demonstrated that the vast majority of personal travel between Switzerland and its neighbours involves no stopping, and the vast majority of trade is done by pre-notification, trusted traders, risk assessment and technology, like cameras and ANPR. That's the vast majority, not all. There are stops, there are checks, and occasionally there are follow-ups away from the border.

But, the Brexiters cry, the EU itself has done the work... and they refer to a report called Smart Border 2.0 - Avoiding a hard border on the island of Ireland for Customs control and the free movement of persons. It's not clear that they've read it though. 

(Incidentally, another Brexiter line is that neither Ireland nor the UK wants a border at all; it's "the EU forcing Ireland to erect checkpoints". However, this favoured report says "the withdrawal of the UK from the EU will create a requirement for some form of border controls on both sides of the Irish border" which presumably refers to the international legal context as set out in the rather technical Article XXIV of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT 1947) which effectively states that either you have a border or you form part of a customs union.)

Smart Border 2.0 seems a good report, with useful data such as numbers of person and vehicle movements across the border, and studies such as the Swiss, Norwegian etc cases mentioned above. But what it sees as eliminating a "hard border" seems rather different from May & co's idea. To take the list of features from the executive summary (comments in round brackets come from elsewhere in the report) and [comments in square brackets are my additions]:

Free Movement of persons under CTA (Common Travel Area):
  • Free movement lanes at major border crossings for eligible people covered under CTA (special lanes at major crossings, minor crossings completely open)
  • Use of enhanced driver's licenses [this is a US notion; is it relevant here?] and RFID (Radio Frequency Identification Device) capabilities [the range at which such devices can be read varies with the chosen technology]
  • Use of ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) at manned and unmanned border crossings (for example, at unmanned crossings to identify vehicles which should present at a manned border crossing) 
  • Requirement for people not eligible under CTA to present at a manned border crossing (if such a person uses another crossing they're considered to have entered illegally)
  • One check: at jurisdiction of entry [I assume this means that everything can always be done at the border]
  • Creation of a frequent travellers program for people not eligible under the CTA
  • Legal basis for collaboration and data exchange between Ireland and Northern Ireland/UK
Create a low-friction border for the movement of goods by:
  • A bilateral EU-UK agreement regulating an advanced Customs cooperation that avoids duplication and where UK and Irish Customs can undertake inspections on behalf of each other
  • Mutual recognition of Authorized Economic Operators (AEO)
  • A Customs-to-Customs technical agreement on exchange of risk data
  • Pre-registration of operators (AEO) and people (Commercial Travellers programme in combination with a Certified Taxable Person programme)
  • Identification system by the border
  • A Single Window (this is an international standard for information management between the private sector and government in relation to import and export) with one-stop-shop-elements (coordinated border management approach where businesses, at import and/or export, have a single contact with one government agency also representing other agencies at the release of goods [I assume this would cover things like (phyto)sanitary checks on farm produce])
  • A Unique Consignment reference number (UCR) (A specific number regulated by a standard from the World Customs Organization that follows a consignment through its life cycle in the global supply chain, making it possible for governments to identify and follow a specific consignment from a risk and compliance perspective)
  • A simplified Customs declaration system (100% electronic) with re-use of export data for imports
  • Mobile Control and Inspection Units
  • Technical surveillance of border (CCTV, ANPR etc)
A Swiss border crossing
There's a lot of technology there, and lots of structures to be designed, implemented and staffed, but the report does talk in terms of it being available by March 2019, and also serving as a model for future UK/EU working, so I'll leave that for now. For the purposes of this post I'll just point out that here we have:
  • manned crossings
  • free movement lanes (and therefore other lanes where you have to stop)
  • radio frequency readers for people via their passports, and for goods
  • ANPR and CCTV
This is infrastructure at the border - quite a lot of it - including several items which the UK government has said will not be present, or Northern Irish representatives have said must not be there.

Then there are significant logistical and legal agreements, including:
  • an agreement that UK and Irish Customs can undertake inspections on each other's behalf
  • mobile control and inspection units (at the Swiss border the two countries' people can operate on either side of the border; they even have helicopters)
When these measures were mentioned in the evidence session with Swiss and Norwegian customs staff, eyebrows were raised and committee members expressed some doubt that they were appropriate for this case.

In addition there are several requirements for data sharing, which in other areas raises the question of which legal jurisdiction is to be used, and which court or other body is required to settle disputes.

This is an idea of "smart borders" that claims to bring together international standards, best practice and new technologies to create low-friction borders that support fast and secure movement of persons and goods. Coordinated border management, with trusted trader and trusted traveller programmes, it says, can significantly reduce compliance requirements and make borders almost friction free [my emphasis]. That sounds very much like the Swiss or Norwegian/Swedish borders, or even the idea presented to cabinet by Boris Johnson (and then publicly rejected by his boss) which considered: "Even if a hard border is reintroduced, we would expect to see 95% + of goods pass the border [without] checks."

It doesn't sound quite like the Irish border someone ordered.

And finally

Why did I mention a sonic screwdriver? Robert Shrimsley in the Financial Times wonders whether Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and other leading Brexiters are big fans of Dr Who, because he observes "much evidence of sonic screwdriver strategy (the all-purpose get out of jail free card for scriptwriters) in their thinking. Their mystical faith in technological solutions is most obvious in discussions about the Irish border". If you can get round the paywall, it's worth a read.


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Sunday, 11 June 2017

In search of certainty

"I want to return to the crucial question of leadership," #MrsMe told us on Monday, three days before the election, "because that's what this election is about."  That turned out well.

"Give me a mandate to lead Britain, give me a mandate to speak for Britain, give me a mandate to fight for Britain and give me a mandate to deliver for Britain,” has been part of that speech, delivered two or three times a day over the weeks in a standardised setting of Me And My Team backdrop and dragooned, vetted workers and/or local party members.  Total control.





And now?  I don't like talking about people's looks and choice of clothes - it's petty - but it's hard not to sometimes.  #MrsMe's wardrobe during the campaign has been on the tweedy side of fashionable, and you have to wonder whether it was her own choice or "recommended" by Lynton Crosby.  At her count in the wee small hours of Friday all I could see was the red Red RED battle lipstick.


And to pledge "certainty" in the middle of Downing St (with Mr May at her shoulder rather than a dozen paces away out of any likely camera shot) it was a severe and very Tory blue suit.


Men - political men in particular - have a much more boring palette of symbols to choose from - the boring suit and possibly a "daring" tie.  Pete Wishart (SNP, Perth and North Perthshire, 2017 majority 21) can carry off a dark lilac two-piece, but Robert Halfon (Conservative, Harlow, 2017 majority 7,031) once chose yellow and drew a lot of catcalls.  Nadhim Zahawi's musical tie and Peter Bone's silly hat drew reprimands from the Commons Speaker.

****

Anyway, to certainty, and leadership.  #MrsMe's "strong and stable" mantra took hold with a lot of people if a thousand vox pops are to be believed, but I think I was starting to detect a bit of ridicule along with the repetition, and among real people, not just politics nerds.  And despite all the spending on Facebook attack ads the Tories had got the young wrong, or was it the kippers, or maybe the militant non-voters?

Whatever it was, #MrsMe had succeeded in frittering away her slim majority to achieve a slim minority.  Yet she emerged from the big black door on Friday to promise certainty.  Her words were meant to convey a stiff backbone and "getting to work" but the manner was very tense.  She disappeared inside having thanked nobody and said nothing to the Tories who had lost their seats.  Only later did somebody force a human pill on her, but even then she was sorry for her fallen colleagues, not to anybody.

She claimed "What the country needs more than ever is certainty, and having secured the largest number of votes and the greatest number of seats in the general election it is clear that only the Conservative and Unionist party has the legitimacy and ability to provide that certainty by commanding a majority in the House of Commons... As we do, we will continue to work with our friends and allies in the Democratic Unionist party in particular".

****


Over the course of Saturday #MrsMe was threatened with a leadership challenge unless she got rid of her advisers/chiefs of staff Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill.  Tories just aren't supposed to do that kind of thing unless they've been out of power for a few years with a Blair to beat and no direction.  Since they still had several fingertips on the prize it was a bit of a surprise.  Nonetheless, by the end of the day she had no special special advisers.

And by the end of the day she had also appointed Gavin Barwell, ex-MP for Croydon Central, ex-housing minister, out of work for perhaps 36 hours since his defeat by the London Labour surge, as chief of staff.  Party sympathisers hailed it as a good appointment, and the man has held several junior minister roles so he must have something about him.  Others criticised her for falling back on an insider who had just been rejected by the popular vote.

Chief of staff is not an elected position, but it has become a very visible one since #MrsMe's selection as leader and prime minister (the question of whether she could legitimately claim that position has emerged again, with observations that she had never been voted in by the party membership as the Tory constitution demands).  Barwell shouldn't be assumed to be such a superhuman that he can do the work of two, so we should expect further appointments.

This brought to mind a conversation with my mother in 1992, when Lynda Chalker was voted out in the Wallasey constituency (replaced by Angela Eagle, sometime would-be Labour leadership hopeful).  That day I was stung by the realisation that I was already more cynical than was good for me, because I expected nothing better, while my mother protested at Thatcher's rejection of the democratic decision and immediate "elevation" to the Lords so that Chalker could could carry on as Minister for Overseas Development with little break.

****


The thing on #MrsMe's mind between that strained Maidenhead count and the visit to the palace was obviously survival.  Her brief statement made it clear that she had been on the phone to Belfast and achieved an agreement in principle with her "friends and allies in the Democratic Unionist party".  Three strands of objection opened up immediately.  The first was the party's illiberal reputation, and it wasn't just the right-on brigade who protested.



It didn't help that one man chosen to represent the largest unionist grouping in Northern Irish politics was Nelson McCausland.  He appeared on Radio 4's Money Box (Paul Lewis has been incisive and scrupulously fair in his reporting of money issues during the election) to tell us that not all of the DUP's supporters deserve the labels being bandied about - homophobe, Christian fundamentalist etc.  What he didn't quite say was that the accusations are unjustified in the first place.  (And what many commentators neglected to mention was that other Ulster parties have similar views - the Social Democratic and Labour Party for example, on abortion.)

McCausland and (some) others in his party believe the Ulster Protestants are a lost tribe of Israel. He has claimed that a third of Northern Ireland's population believe in intelligent design or the young-earth creationist view that the universe was created about 6,000 years ago.  As culture minister in the Northern Ireland assembly he demanded that the Ulster Museum should display exhibits based on anti-Darwinian theories as a matter of human rights, to represent that strand of local thought (as opposed to the usual job of a museum to seek after scientific truth).

Then there's the little matter of the DUP's choice of friends.




Many people wondered what the DUP might want in return.  When ex-Northern Ireland secretary Owen Paterson suggested that "scientific progress" might make it possible to restrict abortion in ways that might cheer them, alarm bells rang.  They would certainly want the UK government to act to reduce pressure on the province to join the rest of us in the 21st century.

What about Brexit?  The DUP was a strong voice (but lonely, in Northern Ireland) for leaving the EU, but they want the fabled "frictionless" border with the south, which might be hard to reconcile with #MrsMe's "no single market, no customs union, no ECJ" stance.  And they will definitely demand a deal.  No Deal would leave them dangling.

The Financial Times offered a considered view and several writers picked up on demands prepared for the eventuality of a hung parliament in 2015 and the party's normal interest - more money and consideration for their patch, no reduction in any kind of benefits.

May seemed likely to grasp the Ulster influence as a way to soften her perceived attack on the elderly (the deficit and the cost of social care perhaps finding themselves in even longer grass) and Brexiters, as they are wont to do, smelled betrayal.  The wrong sort of soft border might leave us closer to the evil EU than "the people" voted for last June.

****


The final problem is the Good Friday Agreement.  Under that national and international agreement a responsibility is placed on the UK government to be neutral in its dealings with the various political parties of the province.  A legal deadline of 29 June this year has been placed on establishing an executive for the devolved Stormont government, and the secretary of state (the uninspiring but ultra-reliable James Brokenshire again, it would appear) should be an honest broker in those talks.  I chose the word referee, and have other tweeters to thank for the news that the new Commons intake includes an experienced whistle-blower.




This is important in national politics - too much favour shown to one side in Stormont could provide a pretext for blocking demands by the other.  But it is also important to the Brexit negotiations.  #MrsMe's letter triggering the beginning of the Article 50 process said "In particular we must pay attention to the UK's unique relationship with the Republic of Ireland and the importance of the peace process [and] continue to uphold the Belfast Agreement".   The EU27's negotiating directives stress "Nothing in the Agreement should undermine the objectives and commitments set out in the Good Friday Agreement".

All sides of Northern Ireland politics might eventually tolerate a single soft-border proposal, but any hint of partisanship by the UK government (and what could be more partisan than a coalition with one of the parties?) might prejudice its agreement.  Sinn Féin representatives in the EU parliament, and all the MEPs from the island will take a particular interest.  I don't think this is going to be easy.



And then the Sunday Times reports "sources" suggesting that the DUP is pressing for Nigel Farage to be included in the Brexit negotiations.  This was something I was wondering about, what with UKIP-DUP connections and that rather odd purchase of pro-Leave advertising in newspapers which aren't available in Northern Ireland.





****

On Sunday morning neither the Tories nor the DUP could supply a spokesperson for the ordinary news.  When you're really busy...

George Osborne, reviewing the Sunday papers, dubbed #MrsMe a "dead woman walking". while Toby Young told him he was considered by Conservatives the "honourable member for Schadenfreude Central".  Osborne told us the prime minister had told him he "needed to get to know [his] party better" when she sacked him, which could have been pursued rather further after Thursday's result and Friday's coldness from No 10.

Ruth Davidson is today's star of the Conservative party, and a worrying one for some people, since her dozen Scottish Tory MPs might be a force for a softer Brexit (I wonder how David Mundell, #MrsMe's only representative north of the border until this week, and her Scottish secretary, will handle it).

Michael Heseltine came out to raise the possibility of a new EU27 proposal on immigration which would make it possible to stay in the EU but at present it looks rather like wishful thinking, though none of the Tories have ever explained in detail why they didn't use the options open to them under the freedom of movement rules.





Michael Fallon, still defence secretary as far as we know, faced a series of horror stories about DUP attitudes with his normal stony face, not so much fending them off as ignoring them completely.  We're not in coalition with them, he argued (though that might have changed again by tomorrow morning), so we don't have to agree with them.  He also dodged the Stormont neutrality question, though at least Marr asked it. 

Jeremy Corbyn was last on Marr, the momentum if not the result giving him pride of place, and he was in full Monsieur Zen mode, ready to open up to anybody in his party who wanted to help.  We'll see how long that lasts.






Saboteurs department

Today's chief saboteur is #MrsMe herself.  Hostages to fortune were plentifiul during the campaign, and it's worth dipping into something issued under her own name.  It starts with "If I lose just six seats I will lose this election, and Jeremy Corbyn will be sitting down to negotiate with the presidents, prime ministers and chancellors of Europe".

And when Boris Johnson tries to help, issuing a call for loyalty which attracts support from Michael Gove and Conor Burns (who?)...





and (as is his habit) gets it all wrong, he really doesn't help..





And in response to Julia Hartley-Brewer and the many other pundits telling us that 80% or more of the votes went to parties with "pro-Brexit" manifestos, the manifestos are far from detailed and specific and, most important, parties can be held to a manifesto to some extent. Voters can't.
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Letter to the Laura Kuenssberg programme - Farage, Musk and "free speech"

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