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David Davis has insisted that a solution will be found to the Irish border issue after Brexit and a trade deal with Brussels is now “incredibly probable”.<\/p>\nDavid Davis has insisted that a solution will be found to the Irish border issue after Brexit and a trade deal with Brussels is now “incredibly probable”.<\/p>\n
The Brexit Secretary said a trade deal – “the most comprehensive one ever” – would make the border problem much easier to solve.<\/p>\n
Mr Davis said the UK Government was committed to protecting the Good Friday Agreement “at all costs”.<\/p>\n
“There is a risk in trying to focus just on the downsides because the real likely outcome – the overwhelmingly likely outcome – is option A,” he told BBC’s Andrew Marr show.<\/p>\n
“Option A is that we get a free-trade agreement, we get a customs agreement, all of those make the Northern Ireland issue much, much easier to solve.”<\/p>\n
The EU withdrawal deal includes a fallback option of Northern Ireland effectively continuing to remain in the customs union, but Mr Davis said either the UK-EU trade deal or new technology could prevent that.<\/p>\n
When challenged that there were no other borders of that kind in the world, Mr Davis told the Andrew Marr Show: “We have got a whole load of new technology now.”<\/p>\n
He added: “There are ways to do this, you can’t just say ‘we haven’t done it anywhere else’, we haven’t attempted to do it anywhere else.”<\/p>\n
Pressed on Labour’s planned amendment to Brexit legislation – which would enshrine the commitment to no hard border in law – Mr Davis said he would have to see what they came up with.<\/p>\n
But he added: “We will not allow a return to the borders of the past, we will preserve – at all costs – the Belfast Agreement.”<\/p>\n
Although Mr Davis said the progress meant it was now “incredibly probable, very, very highly probable” that there would be a final deal, “you can never stop making arrangements” for a potential no-deal scenario.<\/p>\n
He told the show it was like insurance: “You don’t expect your house to burn down, it’s less than a one in 100,000 chance, but you have house insurance anyway.”<\/p>\n