If you enjoyed the last two years and want more of the same, vote for May’s deal

Trade negotiations happen after the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) is signed, so why don’t those wanting a softer Brexit just vote for the WA and argue about trade later? The Political Declaration which does talk about trade is vague and non-binding. The reason is straightforward. Parliament will get very little say on the framework for those trade talks. The only real chance most MPs will get to influence the type of trade relationship the UK has with the EU is by directing the government now, as the price of passing the WA.

However so far parliament has largely failed to do that, largely because Conservative MPs have put party unity above the future health of the country. So what will happen to politics and the economy if parliament votes to pass May’s deal, either today or in a few months time? The first and well known point to make is that nothing would immediately change as far as UK firms and citizens are concerned, because we would start a transition period where we remain inside the Customs Union (CU) and Single Market (but no longer have any say on the rules of either). There will be little economic bounce from ending No Deal uncertainty, for reasons outlined below. So the immediate action will be about the politics of negotiating what happens after the transition period ends.

If you want to know what that would be like, just look at the last year or two. Most of the arguments within the Conservative party over the last year or so have been about trade, and not the content of the WA. So signing the WA settles very little. It does mean that we have signed up to the backstop, but May still pretends that this backstop means we can still stay outside the CU. I cannot see Brexiters meekly accepting that the UK should join the CU either. We will continue to have endless discussion of unicorn ‘alternative arrangements’ for the Irish border designed only to avoid us being up to a CU. The inevitable truth of course is that the backstop implies some part of the UK has to be in the CU, but as the last two years have shown large parts of the Conservative Party refuse to accept reality when they don’t like it.

At some point during the transition period Theresa May could be replaced as Prime Minister. It seems very likely, given the views of Conservative Party members on Brexit, that a Brexiter will be elected in her place. The likely outcome of that, as far as Brexit is concerned, is either that nothing changes, or that the government attempts to persuade the EU to do the impossible.

For example Theresa May is determined that we should leave the Single Market (SM) because her primary aim is to end Freedom of Movement (FM). Any successor is likely to want to leave the SM because they do not want to be bound by EU regulations on minimum workers rights or the environment. Because of the economic damage that will cause (see below) the government will attempt to get a trade agreement with the EU that mitigates that harm. They will find out, yet again, that it is impossible to get anything close to the benefits of the SM without being in the SM. And because the UK will not want to accept that, the negotiations will go on and on.

But at least No Deal will be off the table? Unfortunately just as you think you have avoided one cliff edge, another appears. If no trade deal is done during the transition period, we crash out much like we would with No Deal now. And the Brexiters in government will be saying not to worry the EU always cave at the last minute. They will fight extending the transition period from 21 months, even though it is impossible to negotiate a trade agreement in that time, because the ERG wants to fall off a cliff.

In short, if May’s deal is approved we can look forward to a politics dominated by internal squabbles within the Conservative Party, and the absence of constructive negotiations with Brussels, for perhaps the next four or more years. Much as we have seen for the past two years. This is because the WA does nothing to resolve internal Conservative conflicts, and more fundamentally conflicts inherent with Brexit itself.

If, despite it all, the government manages to negotiate a trade agreement with the EU, what will be the economic and political consequences for the UK? Will it all be worthwhile in the end? A good guide to the economics is the study involving a collaboration between the Centre of Economic Performance and The UK in a Changing Europe, which is both authoritative and representative of similar work. They believe that from 2030 onwards UK GDP per capita will be lower by between 1.9% and 5.5% as a consequence of leaving the Single Market. The midpoint of that range represents lost resources for each household of about £3,000 each year. There will of course be a large hit to the public finances, implying higher taxes or less public spending, even after allowing for an end to contributions to the EU.

Why such a large range? The 1.9% mostly comes from the direct effects of lower and more costly trade, using standard trade modelling techniques together with reasonable estimates of the barriers created by leaving the SM. The government using a similar model get similar numbers. The higher figure in the study’s range is based on empirical evidence for the impact of trade on productivity, which captures other effects such as lower foreign direct investment or reduced competition. Because the empirical evidence captures many more effects than the model, we would expect it to be larger. Those who dispute numbers of this scale in this range have to explain not only why the models, including those used by the government, are wrong but also why the simple correlations between trade and prosperity more than back the models up.

Our best guess is that we have already lost over 2% of GDP as a result of stagnant investment and sterling’s depreciation. As a result, most people will probably not notice the economic impact of ending the transition period, because most of the firms that were going to leave will have already left as a result of cliff edge uncertainty. Instead Brexit will be a gradual decline in the UK relative to the remaining EU.

What about Global Britain? Most trade agreements involve tariff reduction, so being in the CU largely limits the scope for Mr. Fox to do new trade deals. In addition, who would want to harmonise their regulations with the UK, when the gains from doing the same for the EU are much greater. A more likely outcome is that we harmonise our regulations with the US.

The government will be desperate to sign a trade deal with the US to show that ‘global Britain’ is more than a slogan, and that means the US will largely get their way in terms of regulations (including food standards) and participation in the NHS. Thus the longer term political consequence of parliament agreeing to May’s deal is the gradual transition of the UK into a US style economy.

In an age where the regulations governing trade in goods and services are increasingly decided by large regional blocks, the only rationalisation of Brexit that makes any kind of sense is that we move from the EU block to the US block. That is what a lot of the Brexiters want, which is why they resist the backstop so much, because that ties our tariffs to the EU. But the political consequences of tariffs are less important in shaping an economy than regulations on things like working conditions and the environment. That is why, even with the backstop, Brexit will mean we will become more like the US economy. Whatever the merits or otherwise of that, a big difference is that we had a say in how the EU is run but we will have none in what the US does. A 51st state without representation if you like. Taking back control it is not.

Idée fixe

Theresa May's disastrous Brexit strategy 

The arguments against staying in the Custom Union (CU) are pathetic. It is as if Brexiters, having chosen Brexit because of their visceral dislike of the EU's labour and environmental regulation, realised that this would have a major negative impact on trade and tried to compensate. ‘Global Britain’ was born. Even if you strip out the nonsensical associations with past empire, Global Britain must be one of the most ridiculous ideas to be taken seriously by the broadcast media.

According to the Brexiters, the EU prevents us doing good trade deals with other countries because of vested interests in some of the EU countries, and therefore the UK outside the CU would be in a much better position to make good deals. The first point is the EU already has trade agreements with around 50 countries, with more in the pipeline, which is a lot. Another is that third countries want trade deals with the EU much more than they would want them from the UK, because the EU is a bigger market. And finally because of its market size, the EU can set the standards with which other smaller countries have to conform. Market size brings power in any trade agreement.

If you want to see how much market size gives you power, look at what happens when Trump tries to tear up trade agreements. If you have a similar market size, as the EU does, you can retaliate with a reasonable chance of causing enough economic pain in the US to reverse the initial policy. If you are a relatively small economy, as the UK will be if it acts alone, any retaliation could be little more than a pinprick for the other side. This is also, incidentally, why arguments that we somehow had more power over the EU in the Brexit negotiations because of trade balances are ludicrous, because walking away inflicts in proportional terms so much more damage on the UK than it does to the EU.

Global Britain is so dumb a concept that you can concede huge amounts of ground and still win the argument. Suppose the UK did manage to get better trade agreements with the 50 countries the EU already has agreements with and more before the EU does. This is still likely to come nowhere near to replacing the trade we would lose from leaving the EU. The reason is that distance still matters for trade. It is one of the most robust empirical results in economics. Nor have existing trade barriers prevented Germany in particular from increasing trade to China and other countries.

In response Brexiters always say that it is more important to export to the fast growing countries that are the emerging markets, rather than the more slow growing advanced economies in the EU. But not all countries in the EU are growing slowly: we have a fast growing one, Ireland, on our doorstep. You might respond that a country like India is a much bigger market, but the UK’s exports to Ireland in 2016 were 5 times larger than those to India. The UK government have done the calculations and they suggest that successful FTAs with other countries including the US would come nowhere near compensating for lost trade with the EU.

All this is all before we think about the Irish border. It is patently obvious that if the UK leaves the EU’s CU and Single Market for goods there would have to be a ‘hard border’ either on the island of Ireland or within the UK. Instead of acknowledging this obvious fact, Brexiters have gone to incredible lengths to invent mad schemes that purport to avoid this inevitability. The way this sometimes seems to work is that policy entrepreneurs from places like the Legatum Institute feed schemes to ministers, and them after announcing them they ask civil servants to gather evidence.

The Brexiters do all this nonsense because they know even a soft Brexit like the Jersey option does not give them the freedom to ‘complete Thatcher’s project’ they crave. Which brings me to Theresa May. She is very much the wrong person to have been in the right place at the right time. Any Prime Minister worthy of that office should have quickly realised that a hard Brexit would involve economic costs that no PM should inflict on the economy. Another way of putting it is that the Brexit people voted for - taking back control and being at least no worse off in economic terms at the same time - was an impossible project. That realisation should have governed how she approached Brexit from the start. She should have said that she accepted the referendum vote, but she would not implement any deal that would do significant economic harm to the country. No one would have criticised her for such an endeavour.

The task of her premiership should therefore have been to gradually marginalise the Brexiters. They were always going to cry betrayal, so best to ensure that this happened slowly (to avoid giving them the ammunition to create a leadership election) from the moment she became PM. The way to do that was to refuse to trigger Article 50 until a clear negotiating strategy was in place and tested using a realistic view of what the EU would do. Assessments should have been made before, not after, negotiations started to ensure the right strategy was in place. To do that she had to ensure the Brexiters were involved in the process, but not in control.

A process like that would have quickly established that leaving the CU and elements of the Single Market was incompatible with avoiding a hard Irish border. Of course Brexiters would dispute that, but she should have already known the rather loose relationship with the facts that many Brexiters have: for example some continue to this day to claim that the EU erects high barriers to exports from Africa. Anticipating the Irish border issue would mean that most ministers would have quickly realised that only some kind of soft Brexit was possible. There might even have been preliminary discussions with senior EU politicians about whether the Jersey option was acceptable. The UK’s bargaining power, with A50 untriggered, would have been much greater.

Theresa May chose to do the complete opposite of all that, perhaps because she could not contemplate having to take on the Brexit press. She appointed Fox, a Brexiter, to a post that depended on the UK leaving the CU. She drew red lines that were impossible without a hard Brexit. And of course she triggered Article 50 without having done the necessary analysis and with no clear strategy in place. If there was any method in what she did, it seemed to be to appease Brexiters and their press at all costs. And one thing we do know about Theresa May is that once she has chosen a course of action, she sticks to it until it becomes untenable and possibly even after that.

Andrew Rawnsley calls her a Zombie PM. But I think his analysis, of why a PM that is so bad at choosing sensible strategies and so inflexible and so hopeless at fighting elections is still with us, skirts around the answer. The party is hopelessly split over Brexit, and while the majority of MPs have no time for Rees-Mogg, he is currently favourite among the members who are mostly Brexiters and have the final say. As I have said before, so much has been written about the ‘hold’ that Labour party members have over their party, but Conservative party members have saddled the country with one of the most inadequate Prime Ministers it has ever known.

May has handled Brexit terribly, but she has enough political instinct to understand why she is still leading her party. As long as the Brexit negotiations continue, most Conservative MPs may feel too nervous to risk a new leadership election. Equally if she is challenged by the Brexiters she may well win. That knowledge gives her every incentive to bring about the perpetual Brexit that I talked about here. A Zombie PM carrying out a Zombie policy, that could haunt this country for many years to come. [1]

[1] Can Zombies haunt? I'm afraid my knowledge of horror movies is deliberately thin. I was originally going to call this post Idioteque, because it was the thought that came into my head while trying to think of a title (maybe I should blame Steve Bullock). Luckily I later realised the word I was probably searching for. Or maybe not?

Delusions of National Power

As soon as the EU decided, quite rightly, to support Ireland in rejecting any deal that resulted in placing infrastructure at the Irish border, the idea of a Free Trade Agreement between the EU and the UK was dead. It became inevitable that the UK would stay in the Customs Union (CU) and the Single Market (SM). The two possible alternatives, which is that the UK would go ahead and impose a hard border and forsake any deal with the EU, or that a border would be created in the Irish Sea, would not be approved by a majority in parliament. If the UK had a strong bargaining position, it could perhaps persuade the EU to compromise over how much of the Single Market it needed to be part of (the Jersey option), but according to Sam Lowe who gave that option its name the “EU will not contemplate the backstop applying to the whole UK”. The UK gave up any bargaining strength it had when it triggered Article 50.

Yet neither leader of our two main political parties allow themselves to see this inevitable implication of the Irish border. Delusion is at its most extreme in the case of Theresa May, who still thinks it is possible to conclude a deal with the EU that would keep the Brexiters in her party on board by appeasing them at every step. So we have the ludicrous situation where the UK cabinet is at loggerheads over which of two impossible plans they will put forward so they can be rejected by the EU. This isn't rearranging deck chairs on the titantic. It is having a full blown row over how the deck chairs should be arranged as the ship sinks. 

This charade could be put out of its misery by parliament telling May that the UK has to stay in the CU and the EEA. The former might happen, but the Labour leadership, along perhaps with some of its MPs (and not just the few Brexiters), still think that they can negotiate a bespoke version of the Single Market that either avoids rules on state aid or avoids free movement. There is no reason why the EU need contemplate this, given that they know MPs will not approve No Deal. The left or Lexiters can talk all they want about uniting to guarantee that the EU cannot obstruct a future socialist government, but the lesson of Greece is that if the EU has power it will use it.

It is easy to imagine where these delusions of power come from. After all, despite what Brexiters say, the UK did have considerable influence in the EU when it was a member. Ironically both the Single Market and EU expansion owed a lot to UK pressure. The more interesting question I think is why these delusions continue when the reality of the UK’s powerlessness becomes obvious. Political leaders have had a painful year to learn that in these negotiations the EU calls the shots.

I can think of two answers. The first is ideological blindness. This is obvious in the case of the Brexiters, but I think you can also see it elsewhere in various ways. But I also think there are specific dynamics created by the referendum. Leave votes were in part predicated on an illusion of power: the UK would not be worse off because the EU would be desperate to accede to our demands. Once a politician agrees to go with the 'will of the people', they find it very hard to go back to the 52% and say your beliefs were delusions. And no politician wants to say in public that the UK has to do what the EU says. It is very hard for an elected politician to confront English nationalism, a nationalism largely exploited and distorted in my view by a deeply corrupt press.

The UK is therefore in a trap of its own making. It is obvious what has to happen in the end: the UK stays in the CU and SM either inside or outside the EU. But the leadership and perhaps a majority of MPs in the two main parties either cannot see that yet, or can see it but dare not take the steps to get us there. If Brexit is to survive despite always being a fantasy project it has to end with a whimper, but it could take many wasted years and much economic harm to get to that point. There is one way out that will spare politicians’ blushes and revitalise the economy, and that is to hold a referendum on the final deal where the economic costs of the deal are clearly spelt out.

Labour, the polls and the Customs Union

If you think from the title that this post will argue that the poor showing of Labour in the polls means it must change course on Brexit I’m afraid I will disappoint you. Unfortunately I am not at all surprised that Labour’s lead in the polls that it achieved after the election has now all but disappeared. It is certainly true that for anyone who takes an active interest in politics the performance of this government has been as bad as you can get, but most people do not take an active interest. Instead their view is guided by a media environment which aims (actively or passively) to show a very different picture. This is increasingly true as the BBC becomes little more than a mouthpiece for the press.

I am sure Labour could do better at handling this naturally antagonistic environment, but to put this all at the door of Corbyn or Brexit misses the bigger picture. The lesson of the Labour surge during the 2017 election is that once the party gets direct access to voters they like what they see. Once the media filter goes back on, voters see a very different picture. This is the lesson of 2017 that hardly anyone in the media wants to admit.

Having said all that, it remains the case that the one issue in the news all the time is Brexit, and Labour are failing to capitalise on the current divisions within the Conservative party, and the consequent damage the government is creating. Watching the Labour leadership trying not to talk about Brexit is looking more and more like Labour under Miliband trying not to talk about austerity. In both cases we may be seeing triangulation (moving to the middle ground), as I set out in detail here and here. As I was always careful to say, we do not know for sure that this is what Labour are trying to do right now. They may instead by divided over policy. This uncertainty is important, because it means that Labour supporters who might be willing to give them the benefit of the doubt over Brexit are also uncertain whether they should

For that reason, as I have also emphasised, a party that triangulates has to be very careful to always appear to lean away from their opponents side in the direction of their supporters. In the case of Brexit, that means appearing significantly less pro-Brexit than the government. Polls suggest that was achieved during the 2017 election, but that was still in a period where the parties talked in generalities. Since then things have inevitably become more concrete, with the issue of the moment being the Customs Union. The position of the two parties after transition remains different: May is committed to leaving the Customs Union, whereas Labour say everything is on the table. However sometimes Labour’s position looks as much cake and eat it as their opponents.

Sometime this month Labour will discuss its strategy over Brexit. The danger of its current position is clear. Theresa May is going at some point be forced to admit that we will stay in some form of customs union with the EU because of the Irish border issue. The only alternative is to leave with no deal, or dump the DUP. Whichever occurs, Labour’s non-position on the Customs Union will look bad. If she goes for a deal Labour will be the wrong side of the government in terms of triangulation, which will be fatal to its support. If she goes for No Deal because of the Customs Union Labour will be immediately asked what it would do. Deciding to stay in the Customs Union just at the point when the issue becomes critical will look like the political opportunism that it is.

Given that, there is a clear advantage from coming off the fence sooner rather than later. The benefit of declaring to be in favour of staying in the customs union is that they will, once more, create clear distance between their own position and the government. The Conservatives will of course claim that in doing so Labour are no longer supporting the ‘will of the people’, but I doubt that will resonate. People did not vote Leave in the referendum in order to make separate trade deals with other countries. Any voters that do desert Labour on this issue will come back pretty quickly as May is forced to face reality. The government’s own analysis, which Labour should use, suggests deals with non-EU countries cannot make up for the impact of leaving the Customs Union. Above all else, it is very difficult to see why Labour would ever want to leave the Customs Union, given that doing so would do so much harm to its traditional electoral base.

What ignoring Ireland tells you about our governing elite

The hapless progress of the Brexit negotiations continues. I do not mean the almost childish nonsense of May’s new wheeze. Instead I’m talking about the Irish border. It seems, if you read most of the UK press, that out of the blue this new obstacle has been sprung on the UK at the last minute. Some of the press talk about surprise, while the Guardian talks about it ‘emerging’. Some have even decided to cover up their ignorance by inventing conspiracy theories. With political commentary in the UK largely reflecting the beliefs of the UK side, then this also means that this surprise extends to our negotiating team.

In reality there is nothing to be surprised about. The Irish border was one of the three issues to be dealt with in the first stage. As the UK government has consistently said they are leaving the Customs Union and Single Market (CU/SM), and have failed to convince even themselves that they can invent a new magically invisible border that can police countries that have different customs and regulatory regimes, it was only natural that an EU paper would suggest that Northern Ireland stay in the CU/SM to avoid a hard land border.

So why did the UK, and its media, seem to forget about this third issue, when even I had flagged it up as the critical issue a couple of months ago. What I think happened is that the Brexit side convinced itself that, because a hard border would only arise as a result of different trade regimes, then the border was really a trade issue and so should be in stage 2. In other words the EU had simply made a mistake in putting it in Stage 1, and would therefore quietly forget about it.

That reasoning was part wishful thinking and part delusion. Wishful thinking because, as I wrote back in September, it is a problem with no obvious solution that Brexiteers would accept. And delusion because the UK side continues to imagine that the EU is governed by Franco/German interests, and why would these countries be concerned about what happens in Ireland. What it completely failed to understand, and what the EU had understood, was the importance of the border issue to the people on both sides of it. It was an important reason why Northern Ireland voted to Remain.

But I wonder if there is something deeper behind the UK attitude. For too many people in England, the ‘troubles’ in Ireland were a quarrel in a strange country between people of whom we know little, to paraphrase Neville Chamberlain. As a result, there is little comprehension of why a hard border should be such a big deal. You would think memories of bombs going off in England’s cities would change that, but I’m not sure it did, anymore than more recent terrorism has led to a better understanding among English people of tensions within Islam. In contrast, most people in Northern Ireland would move heaven and earth not to go back to those times.

Even while all this might be true, it is no excuse for the same attitudes to be held by our political leaders. John Major knew better than this, as did Tony Blair. Only the arrogant disdain for different realities displayed by Brexiteers can explain a mistake of the magnitude of ignoring the border issue. I suspect any politician that lied the way the Brexiteers lie, or lived in the alternative reality they appear to live in, would not have survived long in UK politics two decades ago, whereas now it has become a criteria for holding high office.

At the end of the day there is little difference between Brexiteers who tell people that new trade deals with countries outside the EU can make up for trade lost with the EU, and Republicans who say scrapping Obamacare will extend coverage and their tax bill reduces taxes for most people. In both countries when the ability to gain office is determined by how well you can fire up or charm a base, because a large part of the media will then assure you have a good chance of winning elections, is it any wonder the political system fails to select for competence, understanding or respect for wisdom and knowledge.

There is a simple solution to the problem of the border. It is for the UK side to commit to only negotiate new trade arrangements that would be consistent with a soft border. [1] That would mean staying in the Customs Union and parts of the Single Market, but it could leave open the possibility of negotiating over the remaining parts of the Single market and perhaps free movement. Anyone who tells you that this concession by the UK side does not respect the referendum result is once again lying: Leave won precisely because they ruled no arrangement out. Any red lines erected after the referendum carry as much weight as the Prime Minister currently has authority.

Already we have many people in the UK saying why should we adapt our policies to keep the people of Ireland happy. This is the Chamberlain type attitude that I talked about earlier. The Irish border is at least as much our creation and our concern as it is of anyone else. Maintaining peace within the UK should be any government’s top priority. The fact that it has failed to make it onto Brexiteers to do list tells you as much about their outlook and competence as you need to know.

[1] Whether the UK will be forced to take this position I do not know. I stand by what I wrote recently that there will almost certainly be a deal, one element of which will be a transition where we stay in the EU/SM. Indeed I understated my case there. First, there can be no such thing as no deal. As Davis has explained, there are things that have to be sorted to keep planes flying and the like. He has described this as “some sort of basic deal without the bits we really want”. What that remark shows is that the ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’ line is simply a bluff and he knows it. The bad deal is no deal. And finally there is parliament. I know it has been pathetic until now, but that does not mean it would sign off on the worst possible kind of Brexit. But what the border issue will most likely show is that it is unlikely we will get to a deal involving transition without cabinet resignations.

The real obstacle for the Brexit negotiations

I’m not going to say anything about the content of yesterday’s speech: I talked about the likelihood of a transition arrangement that involved us staying in the Customs Union and Single Market back in March. My only uncertainty then was whether May could be pushed to a No Deal outcome, but as the government has done absolutely nothing to prepare for that outcome it now seems an empty threat. As for a two year transition period, its an insider joke. You have to have no idea about trade negotiations to imagine it could be done in that time, but as that includes most Brexiteers it serves its purpose.

Instead I want to talk about is what could be the real obstacle to the negotiations moving on to the next stage, and that is the Irish border issue. Many have noted that putting it as a first stage issue seems illogical, because what happens to the Irish border will depend on future trade arrangements between the UK and the EU. There obvious answer to why the Irish border question got put in the first stage is that the EU want to force the UK into staying in the EU’s Customs Union precisely to avoid recreating a border between the two parts of Ireland.*

The UK’s paper on this question makes it clear that there is no realistic compromise on this issue, as Ian Dunt’s discussion makes clear. There is a third way, which is for Northern Ireland to remain part of the Customs Union while the rest of the UK is not, but the DUP will have none of that. This was a major implication of the election result and May’s bribes to obtain a confidence and supply arrangement with the DUP.

A key political question will therefore be whether the Irish government and the EU will play this card that they have dealt themselves. The Irish government would like to, but I suspect (from past experience) that if they came under pressure from the rest of the EU they would back down. But the EU would also like the UK to remain in the Customs Union to resolve the border issue. Indeed everyone would be better off if the UK committed to staying in the Customs Union on a permanent basis. The only obstacle to this are the fantasies of Brexiteers, personified in the department led by Liam Fox.

I said I was not going to talk about it, but perhaps this was one reason why May gave her speech yesterday. By confirming that there could be a transitional deal (which Richard Baldwin might call a pay, obey but no say period), she hopes to dampen the resolve of the Irish government and the EU to make this a sticking point in the negotiations. Will either party think to itself 2 years will become 5, by which time we will have a different government that is likely to make the transitional permanent, or will they use their dominant position in the negotiations to try and force the UK to stay in the Customs Union to avoid creating a border (and perhaps also force the resignation of Fox and others)? At the moment we do not know, but I suspect once again Mrs. May and her cabinet have misjudged the EU side.

*I've added to this sentence and elsewhere compared to the first version of this post, which might have been construed as implying the border was being used as an instrument to achieving an economic goal. I do not think that is the case.