The UK wanted to leave the EU and the common market. That means a border. That much has always been clear. That's basically the whole point of the common market.
The UK also doesn't want a border between Ireland and Northern Ireland but that's stricly an issue between the Republic of Ireland and the UK. Obviously as Ireland is a member and the EU is a constructive and diplomatically open entity, it was more than ready to negociate. Actually, multiple solutions have been proposed and at least one was tentivaly accepted before being reneged by the UK government.
I mean at some point in a negociation if the weak party can't come to its sense, you have to stop wasting everyone's time and tell them to get lost which is more or less what's happening with the UK.
The UK would have had to breach or at least seriously jeopardize the GFA to do so. An agreement they willingly signed up to. The UK brought that upon themselves.
Brexit doesn't, but the GFA was only possible because of the seamless border between the two countries. That lack-of-a-border can only exist if NI remains in the customs union. The rUK can only have a seamless border with NI if it's either in the customs union, or neither are. The UK decided the rUK didn't want to be in it. So now there's a border in the Irish sea.
> Threatening a return to violence in Ireland over Brexit is what I mean by "making things difficult".
Recognizing that putting in jeopardy an international agreement that brought an end to the troubles might incite violence, is not the same thing as threatening violence. It's common sense.
> The Troubles were not about sausage shipments between Belfast and Dublin.
You're right, they were an ethno-nationalist conflict, during which the British government sanctioned the murder of its own citizens, and now continues to protect those murderers from prosecution.
> You're right, they were an ethno-nationalist conflict, during which the British government sanctioned the murder of its own citizens, and now continues to protect those murderers from prosecution.
You're being intentionally obtuse now. If you can't see why an open border is vital for the continued peace, and why removing it would place tension on a peace that took decades to achieve, then you've already made up your mind.
I suppose I should have expected it when you blamed the EU for the self-inflicted woes of Brexit.
I'm not in any way slow to understand, not in this case anyway.
> If you can't see why an open border is vital for the continued peace, and why removing it would place tension on a peace that took decades to achieve, then you've already made up your mind.
I didn't say that, and I'm not even going to engage your straw man.
And I did not blame the EU for Brexit woes, I made a pretty basic statement of fact that would probably cover any negotiation, one which was intended only to signal compromise -- hence why the UK did not leave entirely -- not woe or blame.
From a trade perspective, Northern Ireland is treated as part of the EU at the moment. This allows the Irish border to remain open, as there's no feasible way of enforcing it otherwise. For some context: The European union as a whole has 137 border crossings with third countries to its east. The Irish-Northern Irish border has 275.
Northern Ireland is still saying its goodbyes and looking for its jacket. And even GB is still caught up in hundreds of temporary exemptions and is in many senses operating as part of Europe.
Northern Ireland is still abiding by EU free movement of goods rules and EU Customs Union rules, and goods from the rest of the UK are inspected when they get to Northern Ireland.
It's just a toy. Dial's are difficult to make work in real UIs but they feature a lot in FUIs. FUIs also assume a lot of knowledge/expertise on the part of the user ... to move the dial with a mouse here you need to hold shift, you can also increment with up and down (or shift up/down).
These dials try to be smarter by calculating the torque value of a mouse/touch movement, so you really have to move around the dial like a real one.
