This is not going to work

The consequences of Brexit for the Northern Ireland border have moved up the agenda.  The Independent reports:

Theresa May has been handed an ultimatum to guarantee no hard border on the island of Ireland by December if Britain wants to move to trade talks before the spring.

The EU and Ireland made clear on Friday that the issue of the border had joined the divorce bill as one of the two main problems where “much more progress” is needed to start talking about a transition period.

Following a meeting with the Prime Minister in Gothenburg, the European Council President Donald Tusk suggested British ministers must be joking if they believed it was the EU’s turn to make concessions in talks, attributing such suggestions to an “English sense of humour”.’

Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said Ireland and the EU needed a promise in writing by December that there would be no hard border and suggested eurosceptics had not “thought all this through” in the years they had been pushing for the UK to leave the EU.

I do not see how this question can be resolved.  If the UK insists on leaving the single market and customs union, there would have to be some kind of controls on the Northern Irish border, a position which is now declared by the Irish Republic to be unacceptable.  If Northern Ireland were to remain by itself  in the single market, there would need to be border controls between it and the rest of the UK, a position which would be equally unacceptable to the British government (probably even if it were not dependent on the DUP for its continued survival).  The only other conceivable option would be for the Republic of Ireland to leave the EU along with the UK; and that is obviously a non-starter.

I cannot see an available fudge or compromise.  I don't know where we go from here, other than towards either a cliff-edge no-deal or the abandonment of Brexit altogether.

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