Brexiteers, you were warned about Ireland

If you wished to get to an easy Brexit, well, this isn’t the starting point you’d choose. Once again, the Irish question complicates life for Theresa May’s government. Today’s EU proposals suggesting that, in the absence of a satisfactory deal of the kind proposed back in December, Northern Ireland should, essentially, remain within the EU customs union are both evidently unacceptable to the UK government and a reminder that this is still a negotiated process. What is put on the table today is not necessarily what will be on the table when it is over. 

It is difficult to see how any UK government could agree to a ‘solution’ which, in many essentials, shifts the UK’s external frontier to somewhere in the middle of the Irish Sea. In that respect the fact May’s government limps on thanks to the support of the Democratic Unionist Party is neither really here nor there. 

But, look, the government’s response remains exasperating.