From City AM, in response to this article:
It seems that the EU has a paranoid concern that unless it keeps Northern Ireland under its control as a kind of buffer zone, it will have to erect something like a Maginot Line of defences along its side of the Irish land border to keep out undesirable products such as US-style 'chlorinated chicken'.
Why should that be? Is there any good reason for the EU to assume that once we have become a third country, we will automatically become a hostile power, determined to use that weak point in the EU's external frontier to flod the EU Single Market with non-compliant goods?
At present, the UK has domestic laws which implement Single Market rules, and it is that UK domestic legal arrangement which is effective in keeping non-compliant goods out of the 0.1 per cent of UK GDP which is carried across the land border into the Irish Republic and the rest of the EU.
So why should the EU not be satisfied if the UK now pledges to pass and strictly enforce laws expressly designed to prohibit the carriage across the land border of any goods which the EU deemed unacceptable?
Dr D R Cooper
I'm So Glad I Never Clapped For Them...
2 hours ago
8 comments:
Eh? This makes no sense. Why do we need to pass such laws? The EU won't accept chlorinated chicken so how can anyone export it to them? The importer would be sanctioned.
Because such UK laws would relieve Irish customs officers of any new need to carry out inspections at the border.
L, I refer you to the author himself...
So are we do just ask the Irish Republic to operate the border on the honour system? This is all fine and well until we strike a magical trade deal that the EU doesn't like or indeed vice versa. Smuggling otherwise legal goods is a lot lower risk enterprise than illegal drugs, I expect the black market to grow.
That said, there is already a 20% trade tariff (VAT) on most goods entering the UK and 23% on goods entering the Republic. How is that handled currently? In a magical world, the UK abolishes VAT. The minimum VAT under EU law is 15%, that would introduce a massive black market.
mombers, at present there are no routine inspections of goods as they cross the Irish land border in either direction because there is a sufficient level of trust that EU Single Market law will be adequately upheld through domestic law both north and south of the border, so the goods will as a very general rule conform to relevant EU requirements, and so it would not only be a provocative inconvenience but also wasted effort to intercept and check them as they pass across.
It should be noted that the final removal of border checks only came about with the advent of the Single Market, not the earlier Customs Union, as explained here by Oxford Professor Kevin O'Rourke in December 2017:
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/kevin-o-rourke-britain-wakes-up-to-the-reality-of-free-trade-1.3316849
"Getting rid of border controls on trade thus depended on both the European customs union, and the European single market. Norway is a member of the single market but not the customs union, with the result that there are border controls between it and Sweden. The UK and Ireland were members of a customs union before 1993, but not a single market, and the result again was border controls. And unless both Northern Ireland and the Republic retain equivalent regulations regarding both customs duties, and what can be legally bought and sold on their territories, the result will inevitably be border controls."
Well, I agree with his analysis but not with his last conclusion because there can be more than one legal way to achieve the same practical end.
Collection of any customs duties could be done away from the border, as is often the case now anyway, and that is not the core problem. To keep the Irish land border as open as now would only need the two sides to provide new satisfactory mutual legal guarantees that goods crossing the border will continue to conform to the requirements of their destination market, at least to the same high degree as now, and for that it is not necessary that those requirements are identical in the two markets.
@DC what if we do the entirely sensible thing and say 0% tariffs on good quality cheese from anywhere in the world. Big win for UK consumers and UK farmers can make a plan and produce something that they have a competitive advantage in instead. The EU would say not a chance cheese can come into Ireland from the UK. This would require a hard border to have any teeth.
M, a border has two sides. We do what we want in our side and Ireland/EU do what they like on their side.
See also, pre-1990 west German/east German border.
mombers, if the UK chose to allow cheese to be imported into its territory with a low or zero tariff then that would be the UK's business, not the EU's, and it could only become the EU's business if some of that cheese was then exported to the EU. Would the UK then dispute that whatever import tariff the EU chose to impose on that cheese should be paid? Of course not, and it would be no more than a neighbourly thing for UK customs to co-operate with Irish customs to make sure that whatever was due under EU and Irish law was paid, and that would not need Irish customs officers to be posted at the border to intercept and inspect incoming cargoes and demand on the spot payment of the import tax in the old-fashioned way. There is already close co-operation between the two customs authorities and that could be intensified.
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