With 53 days to go until Brexit, and the EU and the UK still unable to agree a deal that will avoid the return of a hard border in Ireland, today a new body starts work charged with coming up with a solution. It is the alternative arrangements working group, announced by Downing Street last night. Number 10 has named five Conservatives who will take part – the hardline Brexiters Steve Baker, Marcus Fysh and Owen Paterson, and the compromise-minded remainers Damian Green and Nicky Morgan – who will hold meetings today, tomorrow and Wednesday with Stephen Barclay, the Brexit secretary, at the Cabinet Office.
The group will focus on trying to establish the viability of plans to use technology as means of avoiding a hard border in Ireland, as an alternative to the backstop. It will develop ideas set out in the so-called Malthouse compromise. That in turn was based on ideas for the border set out in a paper published in September last year by the European Research Group, The Border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland post-Brexit (pdf).
There are two problems with this.
First, we’ve have been here before. The alternative arrangements working group initiative sounds remarkably similar to one announced by Theresa May in May last year, when she set up two cabinet working groups to look at alternative, post-Brexit customs plans. One of the ideas on the table, “max fac” or maximum facilitation, was quite similar to what the ERG is proposing. The cabinet working group failed to come up with ideas that would impress the EU.
Second, the EU has restated its belief that new technology won’t solve the problem. Yesterday afternoon Sabine Weyand, the EU’s deputy chief Brexit negotiator, retweeted a BBC Reality Check article saying no technological solution would be available in the next few years.