Good afternoon.
Cast your minds back to December, when the UK agreed to a “backstop” solution for Northern Ireland to guarantee no hard border. The text was a little ambiguous but in effect it would force the UK to stay fully aligned with EU rules which “support cross-border cooperation” to remove the need for any checks at the 310-mile crossing.
Despite giving the green light to the idea back then, the British government has vacillated for several months on the issue and is yet to transfer the agreement into legal text.
Why? Because - and the Brexiteers cottoned on to this far too late in the game - the backstop limits the UK’s ability to diverge from the EU in key trading areas, weakening...