We have to be careful in discussing that issue. Again, we are clearly not drawing exact parallels of any description. I was in Dublin on Friday morning to speak at an event in the very beautiful Royal Irish Academy in Dawson Street. I had a series of meetings, including with the British Irish Chamber of Commerce, which on Monday published an excellent report about trade and the fact that a customs union needs to be secured in order for the chamber of commerce to continue the work that it does, which is very important for trade between the UK and Ireland.
After speaking at the event in Dublin, I was driven to Belfast for a meeting with cross-community leaders, and then I presented an award and spoke at the Aisling awards ceremony, which is a big cross-community event. On Saturday morning, I was given a tour of the peace walls by Professor Deirdre Heenan, who is pro-vice-chancellor of the University of Ulster and an expert on community and community issues. I was very struck by the sensitivity and the importance of the border issue there.
I was in Brussels last week, too, where I was struck by how the dialogue there on the question of “sufficient progress” on that issue had changed utterly in the two or three weeks since I was last there. It had moved on from issues of finance and citizens’ rights to a focus that was almost entirely on the border issue and how it would be resolved. That will be up to negotiators and others, but it is a very difficult conundrum. It is obviously utterly unacceptable to Ireland and to many people in Northern Ireland that there should be any impediment on the border. If you drive the border, you know precisely why that is. It has 257 crossing points. Only 20 of them were open before the single market, so that has transformed the position.
There is a wonderful statistic, which I cannot remember exactly, about border crossings in Europe: there are far, far fewer crossing points—the number is in the teens, I think—on European frontiers from the Arctic circle to the Black Sea than there are on the border with Ireland. It would change things in a very damaging way were there to be impediments on crossings. That needs to be resolved, but the UK Government is resolving it in the context of its political agreement with the Democratic Unionist Party, and you have heard what happened at the DUP conference this week. It is up to them to resolve it.
As I said in an interview in Ireland on Friday morning, there are issues that arise for the Scottish ports of Ardrossan, Stranraer and Cairnryan with a border down the Irish Sea. The physical issues would have to be coped with, of course, because of the capability of those ports. If customs checks had to be introduced, that would create a big difficulty. I have met representatives of the British Ports Association and the UK Chamber of Shipping to talk about the physical infrastructure of ports, which would take some time to deal with. There are also security implications that will have to be dealt with too. That is clearly unacceptable in parts of Northern Ireland, and it could be problematic.
The solution lies in what the Scottish Government’s position is now and has been for the past year, which is that we should not be leaving the EU but that we should definitely not be leaving the single market and the customs union. That is crazy, because it will create all those difficulties and there are no advantages to leaving them. The “boasted advantages”—if I may use that Burnsian phrase—of Brexit in that regard are absolutely untested and fall to pieces when you look at them closely. Where are the free-trade agreements that are to be held with lots of other countries and are going to compensate us for the front-page story today about the Fraser of Allander institute report about the loss of jobs and trading income that will result from our leaving the customs union? We need to be clear that the best solution is undoubtedly continuation of the customs union and the single market—certainly of the customs union—and if that is to take place for Scotland, it should also take place for rest of the UK, because that avoids those issues and allows the trading relationships to continue.
It is not simply the Scottish Government that is saying that. It is being said widely, for example by the British Irish Chamber of Commerce. It is the position of business and industry, which are saying that, if we impose new barriers because we have removed ourselves from the customs union, we will do nobody any favours of any description. The French ambassador to the United States pointed out, rather memorably, about a month ago that it is not in the interests of free trade for us to remove ourselves from the largest free-trade block on the planet and from 53 free-trade agreements, which is precisely what is happening. That needs to be reconsidered.