Professor David Phinnemore:

I will start with the reference to Cyprus. We have to start looking - possibly again and possibly in more detail - at what arrangements exist on the fringes of the EU to find out what models and precedents exist that we might be able to exploit. Equally, we should latch on to the principle of differentiation at the Border - that there can be creative solutions. They need not necessarily be ones that already exist. This comes back to one of the rationales behind European integration. It is about solving problems. The one thing we probably see reflected in the protocol, whether one likes or dislikes it, is the fact that there has been some creative thinking about what one could possibly do with regard to a non-member state and a part of it in terms of its future relationship with the EU.

On the specific issue of Cyprus, the practical issue is how one determines someone holding a UK passport as resident in Northern Ireland. We do not have identification cards. We do not have any way, as residents of the UK, of identifying where we reside because the passports do not have residency indicated in them, at least in terms of where someone is in the UK.

On the Good Friday Agreement and the rights dimension, I refer members to the work of colleagues, particularly Colin Harvey and Chris McCrudden, who are lawyers steeped in traditions of human rights and concerns around them and how they are implemented. They have been producing some very detailed studies. Going back to the point I made about the protocol, whereas the protocol flags the issue of rights, possibly more so than we might have anticipated originally, it raises questions about what rights we are talking about because this has not been spelled out as yet. What enforcement mechanisms will there be? It is fair enough having statements about rights but what will the mechanisms be for their enforcement? I will leave it there. There are still questions to be addressed. We may see more once the detail of the protocol comes out.

Regarding the question of trade and whether by remaining in the Single Market and customs union, the UK does not leave EU, I think in those circumstances the UK does leave the EU for the reasons mentioned by Dr. Hayward. In addition, we must recognise that the EU is far more than just participation in a customs union and the Single Market. There are whole swathes of areas of co-operation. We have barely touched upon justice and home affairs, internal security, external security, the defence dimension and the foreign policy dimension, about which the British Government has produced a lengthy paper essentially asking to opt into most of what it is trying to leave, which seems somewhat paradoxical. I think in the circumstances described, the UK would still be leaving the EU.

With regard to the question of whether the UK is basically constrained in what it can do in international trade if it stays in the customs union and Single Market, it is not fully constrained. Some interesting work has been done recently on the case of Turkey, which is in a customs union arrangement with the EU. The customs union covers goods; it does not cover services. There is plenty of scope for the British to pursue their own trade agreements in services and given how significant the service sector is to the British economy, that is probably where they are looking for latitude. I think a credible argument can be made for the UK staying in the customs union but still retaining an element of freedom to conclude its own trade agreements.

Regarding the issue of a hard border and possibly thinking pragmatically, there is an argument for looking at what capacity may exist to have controls and checks east-west or to put it differently, an increase in controls and checks east-west. This is partly about language. We could do with getting away from the language of borders because we have controls and checks between North and South and east and west.

If the UK secures a deep and comprehensive free trade area, if there is an element of regulatory alignment in respect of the movement of goods, and if the UK develops these max fac solutions for the movement of goods, the level of control east-west, or the increase, would not be overly extensive. It could be that the facilitation of movement east-west is not significantly disrupted, particularly when it is borne in mind that goods crossing those borders are already stopped in order to be permitted to get on ships. They are on ships for a certain period. There is arguably the time and space to carry out those checks unobtrusively.

We also need to consider, when thinking about potential solutions, where the burdens fall. Some interesting figures have been produced recently that indicate that the number of small traders involved in North-South trade is far greater than the number of east-west traders. A lot of the trade east-west involves large-scale companies that can probably absorb the economic costs more than many of the small traders working on very small margins across the North-South border. What we are missing is a comprehensive economic analysis of where the impacts would fall. This partly reflects the fact that so many of the economic analyses of Brexit from a UK perspective were done for the UK as whole or, quite often, for Great Britain. Therefore, we do not really have the data to draw a full conclusion on this issue, but it is something we need to explore. We need to look at the issues pragmatically and try to depoliticise them as far as possible.