Its fair to say that whether it is in line with or 'breaks' the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement is disputed - the UK courts recently ruled that imposing a border on a no deal exit would not breach it, and what the UK is proposing is less than that.

The Republic of Ireland (or at least their political leadership) seem to interpret the agreement differently, and insist that the Good Friday Agreement means that all laws relating to trade or commerce must be exactly the same in both NI and the RoI (they cite some provisions on the 'all island economy' in support of this).

Equally the unionists believe that the May Withdrawal Agreement breaches the GFA for different reasons - because the GFA acknowledges UK sovereignty over NI and says that this shouldn't be changed without a border poll (which the unionists would likely win still).

It is technically true to say the the GFA does not prohibit border controls. However the GFA was negotiated with joint EU membership as part of the existing political background, so it was taken for granted.

In practice anything which stops people crossing the border without let or hindrance will be treated by the Republicans as an abrogation of the intent of the GFA.

Border controls themselves aren't really the major item in dispute (and there are already forms of controls for contraband, alcohol/fuel duty, VAT, and movement of people which occur in a dedramatised way) - its alignment of law and regulation which is disputed much more heavily.

This isn't widely understood, I think.

They're not really in dispute right now, but they will be a massive, massive flashpoint following Brexit.

The nationalists will treat it as a symbol, and there will likley be violence associated with any border checks.

If we can keep these away from the border, it would be better, but not sure how you prevent smuggling in that kind of environment.

A soft border with an implicit tolerance of smuggling at a certain level (which in reality is what we have today vs the rest of the world - witness the amount of fake-certified and dangerous goods that come in from eg China with no real enforcement), together with cooperation on enforcement for the bigger offenders (eg the UK assisting in stopping goods before they reach the border if they are destined for RoI and known not to comply with EU standards) would seem to be the pragmatic solution. I don’t think the two sides are really all that far apart on this point.

As I mentioned, the much bigger issue is regulatory alignment more generally for reasons which are not related to border infrastructure (North-South cooperation and the all island economy), where there is a much bigger gap between the sides.

Yep, that is a common misunderstanding. The solution is not the deal, the solution is the strategy.

The reason we are in this situation is because the UK essentially agreed to everything the EU wanted, and MPs voted it down. That is democracy.

Johnson's approach is to say: we need to leave. The EU has red lines, that is fine, we will try to come to whatever agreement is possible but if no agreement is found then we will just get on with it.

Your argument is that Brexit cannot happen because it is impossible. That is fine. But the UK voted for Brexit, Parliament voted for Brexit, and Brexit parties won a general election (and there is no Remain majority). So the solution is equally not to ignore voters.

Basically there is a general agreement that pigs should fly, but nobody seem to agree on the mechanics (the option of shooting them from a cannon apparently is not liked by anybody).

I think it's pretty clear that in many western democracies it's getting increasingly easy to form majorities "against" stuff while it's getting harder to form majorities "for stuff".

There's a majority in the UK that wants to live the EU, but there's no majority agreeing on where to go from there. That's why this referendum was mindbogglingly stupid to begin with, you can't give the people a choice if you're not prepared to handle both outcomes. What's next, a referendum for "social security for all and basic income and no taxes, also free candy. Yes or no?" Of course the people is sovereign, but democracy can't trump reality. How can you live the UK without hard border with Ireland? This wasn't even a topic at the time of the referendum as I recall.

David Cameron made one of the biggest political errors in modern history here.

Very true (and might I say, a rare sensible comment on this topic). The end result is very much a function of the starting point.

But I would say that Johnson is the only one who has actually recognised the difficulty. His starting point, unfortunately three years down the line and after the deal was voted down four times, is to say that this is really difficult and the priority is to do what is possible, not constantly try to rework the fundamentally impossible.

I think it is worth going over the history leading up to Cameron calling the referendum. As always, as with austerity, people read back from the present and assume that all the information was available then. Cameron was facing down a pretty significant rebellion (as it turned out people really didn't like the EU), and he thought he could appease this group with a deal from the EU. The mistake wasn't the referendum but his delusion that the EU would him something useful (this isn't to blame the EU, merely to observe that is was politically impossible for them to do so).

>But I would say that Johnson is the only one who has actually recognised the difficulty

Boy, that's richer than mum's trifle, considering that Boris "£350 million for the NHS" Johnson threw his weight behind the whole sorry endeavour in the first place, while fully half the population voted against it. I think it's pretty fair to say that the difficulty has been obvious to vast swathes of people since the very beginning.

> I think it's pretty clear that in many western democracies it's getting increasingly easy to form majorities "against" stuff while it's getting harder to form majorities "for stuff".

What.

"I'm not anti EU, I'm pro independence"?

From this perspective the people who are against Brexit are inherently against change, or fear of the unknown, and pro Brexiteers are fighting to own their own laws.

I'm not saying this is or isn't my opinion, but your opening presumption is flawed.

You're putting words in my mouth. Clearly Brexit is a huge change so brexiteers are clearly not against it. I also don't know where you get the "fear of the unknown" from, you're building a strawman. Brexit is the unknown and Remainers seem to fear that a whole lot.

If you were to find something unifying the Brexit mindset, something that would unify Brexiteers as a whole, what would it be?

"Pro-independance" doesn't work because that's simply too vague. As we've seen over the past couple of years there's no agreement on what an independent UK would look like. What unifies the Brexiteers is the rejection of the European Union, they don't seem to adhere to any constructive project as a whole. And to be clear that's not to say that they're not individually constructive, just that there's no constructive consensus among this majority.

It isn't my intention to build a strawman, so sorry if that's how you interpreted it, but I'll try and rephrase.

We may live in different regions or have had different conversations, but the trend in conversations I've had in the North across all age groups seems to be rejection of the EU because they're holding us back. The last part is key, because it's not destructive, it's wanting to be constructive but not being able to. Some (most? I don't know) Brexiteers don't hate the EU, they just think we can be a better nation without them.

Either way, I just don't think you can break it down to constructive and destructive mindsets. My argument is that those are entirely subjective depending on your viewpoint (leave/remain) anyway.

>David Cameron made one of the biggest political errors in modern history here.

By asking people to have a voice instead of deciding for them??

Direct democracy can work very well - just look at Switzerland, which is the envy of the world when it comes to governance. It may/may not be scalable, but important decisions like EU membership should be decided by the people, not the elite.

> just look at Switzerland

You are right that Switzerland has a long history of direct democracy. But the reason it works at all is that people vote whether to accept specific proposals that have already been drawn up.

This was the biggest flaw in the Brexit referendum. As formulated, it was way too woolly and covered a wide range of possible plans.

At which point, some rabid Brexiteer chimes in and says "No, Brexit was very clearly defined as ... ", and then proceeds to reel off their pet opinions-as-facts. QED.

> By asking people to have a voice instead of deciding for them??

The question posed was simply "Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?"

No implementation details, no specifics, no timeline, and not binding. In the Swiss model, you'd have subsequent direct votes on specific plans once decided upon. (Citizens need only garner 50k signatures to force a vote for/against the specific law implementing a deal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optional_referendum)

Right now, they'd be voting on "given our inability to strike a deal, should we take a no-deal exit?", which I don't think anyone can really argue would get the same 52% the more general Brexit referendum did.

> In the Swiss model, you'd have subsequent direct votes on specific plans once decided upon.

This is a flawed assumption. The EU referendum absolutely was an exercise in direct democracy. Nowhere does it say that direct democracy requires a specific set of questions to be asked.

Breakup from the EU is so complex that we could not have prepared for it enough to know the ramifications of any options. Politics does not work like that and neither does life.

>Breakup from the EU is so complex that we could not have prepared for it enough to know the ramifications of any options.

You're making it sound as if deciding what to do with the Irish border is some super intricate detail that nobody could anticipate. Enforcing borders (for immigration) was probably the #1 talking point during the referendum campaign, yet it turns out that nobody knows how to actually implement it.

I agree that the referendum was, de facto, an exercise in direct democracy. Yet it's also pretty clear that it failed to capture exactly the will of the people because there doesn't seem to be a majority behind any concrete proposal for leaving the union.

Nobody cared about the Irish border. I remember talking to my boss a few days after (he's English, I'm Irish) and I mentioned the North. He assumed that I meant the North of England, rather than Northern Ireland, which just goes to show how little thought was given to Northern Ireland during the referendum.

Yup. Ireland is by far the biggest issue we've got to deal with. I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that a soft border (with CCTV cameras only and no hard barriers) is our only option.

The problem is no govt. has the ability to set this all up within six weeks and is what they should've been doing these past three years rather than endlessly bike-shedding the little things and ignoring the biggest issues at hand...

Legitimate traffic which is the vast majority will have to go over official channels anyway, so it's feasible that moving goods across the border could be as simple as registering your vehicle and declaring the contents.

It's not perfect, but the alternatives are much worse.

> The EU referendum absolutely was an exercise in direct democracy.

Not in the slightest. It was explicitly non-binding on a legal level. It was fundamentally an opinion poll with a large sample size.

> Breakup from the EU is so complex that we could not have prepared for it enough to know the ramifications of any options.

Perhaps, but that's why the people have elected representatives, who are very clearly saying the no-deal approach isn't acceptable.

Claiming the Brexit referendum gives the PM the right to do anything he wants is silly. It's like claiming "we should fund the NHS" is carte blanche to have the NHS euthanize everyone under 40 because "the people approved the funding".

> Not in the slightest. It was explicitly non-binding on a legal level. It was fundamentally an opinion poll with a large sample size.

The spirit of the referendum, legally binding or not, is direct democracy in action. Regardless of what you believe, it would be a travesty to ignore the will of the people, hard as it may be to carry out their command to leave the EU.

> Claiming the Brexit referendum gives the PM the right to do anything he wants is silly. It's like claiming "we should fund the NHS" is carte blanche to have the NHS euthanize everyone under 40 because "the people approved the funding".

Now if you believe the referendum was just 'an opinion poll', and no deal is also by far the most popular option right now[0]: Even if you disagree with it, Boris trying to push no deal is legitimate if you accept the referendum is legitimate.

[0] https://whatukthinks.org/eu/questions/is-the-conservative-pa...

The poll you cite indicates a 4 to 6% support for cancelling Brexit. It seems... unlikely... that 90% of Remain voters have now switched over to Leave.

I think you've accidentally linked to a poll of just Conservative party members or something along those lines. Here's the corresponding poll of Labour members: https://whatukthinks.org/eu/questions/is-the-labour-partys-v...

and Lib Dems: https://whatukthinks.org/eu/questions/is-the-liberal-democra...

A better set of polls appears to be here, with 77 polls instead of two, and across the entire populace instead of individual parties. Remain's beating Leave at the moment (and has been consistently). Since you're interested in the Will of the People, here you go:

https://whatukthinks.org/eu/questions/if-a-second-eu-referen...

> The poll you cite indicates a 4 to 6% support for cancelling Brexit. It seems... unlikely... that 90% of Remain voters have now switched over to Leave.

Why not? Losers consent is a part of democracy and life. However I will admit I cited a poor source, it was not my intention to be deceptive.

The thing is, the will of the people is what the referendum said at the time, nothing else. If it's changed, so be it, but the first result must be implemented first.

> If there was another referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, how would you vote?

The question is also extremely suspect. It's not asking what the current opinion is, it's saying if we do it all again. These are different. It'd be great if all votes could be done with the benefit of hindsight, but to my knowledge nobody has invented a time machine yet.

> Losers consent is a part of democracy and life.

Oh, come on. When Labour wins an election the entire Tory party doesn't switch over to their side of things. Arguing that Remain has dropped to 4-6% of the populace is not reasonable.

> The thing is, the will of the people is what the referendum said at the time, nothing else.

What law established this? This is particularly disingenuous given the explicitly non-binding nature of the first referendum.

You were perfectly happy to cite current opinion polls when you thought they supported your will of the people argument.

> It'd be great if all votes could be done with the benefit of hindsight, but to my knowledge nobody has invented a time machine yet.

A second referendum can absolutely be done with hindsight. "Gee, that didn't go well."

> When Labour wins an election the entire Tory party doesn't switch over to their side of things.

Losers consent in the case you mentioned is that Labour accept the Tory government as legitimate. The difference is a referendum is supposed to be final (and it was indeed sold as so), but with an election the opposition will get elected again someday. The proper thing for Labour to do right now is push for the best deal they can to minimise what they believe is a bad decision. It should not be to try as hard as possible to do anything but Brexit.

> What law established this? This is particularly disingenuous given the explicitly non-binding nature of the first referendum.

No law established this, but given our unwritten constitution, can we really be certain that it's legal to ignore a referendum without court scrutiny (which has a divided opinion here btw)? The ballet paper literally said "The government will implement your decision" - I think it's fair to say if it has all the features/promises/legitimacy of a vote, it's a vote.

> You were perfectly happy to cite current opinion polls when you thought they supported your will of the people argument.

I was responding to your argument that a referendum is basically a poll (which I disagreed with anyway).

> A second referendum can absolutely be done with hindsight. "Gee, that didn't go well."

I'm not a fan of second referendum. I'm asking you honestly here, if it was remain won by 4%, and leavers were complaining for 3 years, would you call it legitimate to have another referendum so soon? Of course not, they'd be accused of being undemocratic and I believe they're right.

> The thing is, the will of the people is what the referendum said at the time, nothing else. If it's changed, so be it, but the first result must be implemented first.

Regardless of your intent, this specifically argues that we should implement a decision made by people who since have more information and have changed their minds. That is emphatically not a good position.

This is why we generally (mildly facetious) are governed by learned adults, and not children frozen in time. The ability to change opinions is what helps us and society to evolve.

That's why there are elections, the vast majority of the electorate really isn't equipped to deal with all the details and ramifications of what a big decision like this entails: therefore we choose representatives whose ideas we agree with so that they, along with experts of choice, can deep-dive into the consequences of each decision and make appropriate choices. For example: ask me about agricultural policy and you'll find out why I should have no business in making any sort of significant decisions about it.

It's the same reason we go to a doctor when we're sick or to an architect when we want to design a house: we go to someone whose job is to know how to do something properly.

In the Swiss model you'll never find single, completely vague and as wide-reaching questions like the one that lead to brexit.

In general, Swiss referenda are fairly well-thought-out; the voter knows what they're voting for.

Interestingly, one recent case where it was _not_ well-specified or not well-thought-out caused a bit of a crisis, and in effect lead to the government fudging a non-solution. This case also involved the EU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Swiss_immigration_initiat...