A no-deal Brexit means UK crashes out of EU on October 31 with no plans, agreements, or any coherent plan to handle how goods that once easily passed both ways now being subject to border checks, tariffs, and presumably long delays. Brits living in Europe will find things much more complicated for them, ditto for people from EU countries living in UK. And UK could quite possible fracture too.
A major problem is what will happen to Ireland borders with no-deal Brexit and no backstop deal.
In Monday night’s Sun debate, both of them made a new commitment that makes no deal the most likely outcome – they both said they wanted to scrap the so-called backstop, the mechanism for keeping open the border on the island of Ireland.
Johnson said that putting a time limit on the backstop, or acquiring a unilateral right for the UK to withdraw from the backstop, would no longer be an acceptable reform.
The backstop had to go altogether.
Right now, Northern Ireland (which is part of the UK) and Ireland have seamless borders. People and goods can pass easily and with few restrictions. That’s because UK and Ireland are currently part of the EU single market. If UK leaves the EU via Brexit, the hope was the open borders between Northern Ireland and Ireland could be preserved with a backstop agreement. But Boris Johnson wants to kill that possibility. This will have serious, major repercussions.
Until the deal on the future relationship is done, the backstop would keep the UK effectively inside the EU’s customs union but with Northern Ireland also conforming to some rules of the single market. Critics say a different status for Northern Ireland could threaten the existence of the United Kingdom and fear that the backstop could become permanent.
Comments to the Peston’s tweet.
“But doesn’t ‘no deal’ mean a permanent border?
Yes
And a shortcut to NI separating from the UK.
Followed by Scotland.
And Wales. We have had enough of this shit.”
“They’ll get it by doing nothing. The default right now is crashing out without a deal on the 31st October. To avoid it, the next PM has to either ask for (and get) an extension, push the WA [Withdrawal Agreement] through parliament, or cancel Article 50; neither of which is very likely.”