Fintan O’Toole: Unionism traps itself in a 1950s sci-fi B-movie

Many Unionist politicians are people of deep faith. After this week’s momentous European Union proposal for a legal text on Britain’s withdrawal from the EU, they had better pray for miracle. A miracle, that is, of technology.

Last July, the Democratic Unionist Party MP Jeffrey Donaldson, spoke in tones of pure rapture about the fabulous scientific solutions that would make the problem of the Irish Border after Brexit disappear: "Technology is a wonderful thing".

It had better be – for if it is not, the DUP’s support for Brexit will have done more to undermine unionism than Irish nationalism has managed in almost a century.

Reacting last Wednesday to the special protocol on Ireland in the EU's draft text, Theresa May said it would "threaten the constitutional integrity of the UK".

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They have gambled the future of unionism on the sudden emergence of a technology that has yet to be invented

She is, in this at least, entirely right. She should not have been surprised, however – it was obvious all along that Brexit would undermine the constitutional integrity of the UK.

May also said that “No UK prime minster could ever agree to it”. In this she was entirely wrong – a British prime minister already did. Her name is Theresa May and she signed up to it last December.

But as with the broader undermining of the integrity of the UK, she and her allies in the DUP can be surprised only if they never knew what they were doing in the first place. They have gambled the future of unionism on the sudden emergence of a technology that has yet to be invented.

If you’re a unionist, Wednesday’s text is disastrous. It is like one of those forensic anthropology documentaries in which experts put a face and muscles and hair on the bones of an exhumed ancient skeleton so we can see in retrospect what the person might have looked like.

But when you put the legal flesh on this skeleton, it looks, from a unionist perspective, like a monster

The bare bones are what May signed up to on December 8th, in particular article 49 with its agreement that, in the absence of other solutions, Northern Ireland will retain “full alignment” with the rules of the customs union and the single market, in order to preserve the Belfast Agreement and the all-Ireland economy.

But when you put the legal flesh on this skeleton, it looks, from a unionist perspective, like a monster. It means that Northern Ireland, after Brexit, becomes a radically different political and economic space from the rest of the UK.

It remains, in effect, part of the EU customs union. Its citizens remain, if they so choose, full EU citizens. EU customs officials will work alongside their UK counterparts at Northern Irish ports and airports. EU rules on state aids to industry will continue to apply in part to Northern Ireland even when they disappear in Britain. That great bugbear of the Brexiteers, the European Court of Justice, will retain significant jurisdiction in the North.

Famous declaration

If this text becomes law – and it seems extremely unlikely that the EU will agree to weaken it – Margaret Thatcher’s famous declaration that Northern Ireland is as British as Finchley will have a historic rejoinder: Northern Ireland will be almost as European as the Republic of Ireland.

If you’re a unionist, there are in theory two ways to prevent this monstrous chimera – a Northern Ireland that is neither inside nor outside the EU and therefore neither inside nor outside the UK – from being born. But in reality, there is only one.

The first possibility is an impossibility: the frictionless free trade between the UK and the EU in which everything pretty much carries on as it is now and the Border doesn’t matter. This is simply not going to happen – even the British government is looking instead for “managed divergence”.

Which leaves us with the single possibility: the technological miracle.

Unionism – both British and Northern Irish – has written itself into a 1950s science fiction B-movie called The Thing from Brussels. Its world is threatened by an alien being: a half-European Ulster. And it is desperately hoping for a heroic rescuer in the form of a scientist in white coat with geeky glasses. He (it would definitely be a he) has been working away in a basement on a magical formula for creating frictionless borders. His colleagues have been sneering at him. But now his hour has come. He will save unionism.

Johnson's comparison is either astonishingly ignorant or wildly disingenuous

And this is about as plausible as most 1950s sci-fi movies. To understand this, consider Boris Johnson’s claims on BBC Radio 4 last Tuesday that the Irish Border could be just like the border between Camden and Westminster. As motorists cross that line, incurring a congestion charge, they are monitored by technology “anaesthetically and invisibly [taking] hundreds of millions of pounds from the accounts of people travelling between those two boroughs without any need for border checks whatever”.

Enormous difficulty

Leaving aside the obvious problem that an external EU border is not exactly like a London borough division, there is still an enormous difficulty here. For Johnson seems to have read neither his own government’s position paper on Ireland and Brexit, published last summer, or the agreement that Theresa May signed in December. Both of these documents commit the British, not just to having no personal border checks in Ireland but, in the British government’s own words, to “avoid any physical border infrastructure in either the United Kingdom or Ireland, for any purpose”.

London’s congestion charge works because it has a very large physical infrastructure: 646 cameras mounted on big gantries at 203 different sites. Even if number plate recognition were the solution for Ireland (which it is not), there would have to be many more cameras to cover the 110 million annual trips across 300 different border crossings. And the erection of those big gantries is exactly what the British government, entirely of its own volition, has pledged not to do.

So Johnson’s comparison is either astonishingly ignorant or wildly disingenuous.

But perhaps there is a crack team of boffins working away on some other technological solution that requires no physical infrastructure? Actually, two of the very few questions we can answer with certainty about the Brexit process are: who is working on this and what have they come up with? The answers are: nobody and nothing. Hard as it may be to fathom, given that the future of unionism depends on it, the British have done damn all to create their technological solution.

The people whose job it is to come up with the technological solutions not only have no plans – they have no plans to make plans

Last November, the public accounts committee at Westminster asked the woman in charge of planning the UK's post-Brexit borders, Karen Wheeler, "From your point of view, in your team's planning, what are the specific challenges associated with planning for these changes between the UK and southern Ireland?"

Her reply was breathtaking: "I am not really able to say. That area is not within the scope that we in the Border Planning Group have been working on. The arrangements on Ireland are still subject to negotiations and ministerial discussion, so that has not come within our scope at this stage." The head of UK customs, Jon Thompson, added that in fact "We need the political process to go a bit further before we can fully get into understanding it."

In other words, the people whose job it is to come up with the technological solutions not only have no plans – they have no plans to make plans. If the integrity of the UK depends on this approach, it doesn’t have a prayer.