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And of course it's not the only deal - but notice that it moves none of the EU "red lines". Instead it puts a customs border between parts of the UK. Which was previously unthinkable on the UK side. And was certainly not in the Leave referendum prospectus.

Anyone who thinks this deal is good - better than remain - needs to articulate why a customs border in the UK is an improvement.




The alternative for the DUP if the scupper this will be a united Ireland referendum


Republic of Ireland cannot take the reunification financially. Northern Ireland is underdeveloped and relying on governmental post to keep afloat.

Rep doesn't currently have enough resources to support integration of north. Unfortunately at the moment its romanticized dream.


Loads of EU areas are underdeveloped, and the EU spends a lot of money helping develop them. We would help Ireland the same way.

Edit: Not sure why someone reflexively downvoted a factual post, but here is some background: https://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/en/funding/erdf/

And here's a map showing that Northern Ireland is already classed as a "transition region", like Eastern Germany for example: https://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/sources/what/future/img...


According to https://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/sites/agriculture/files/rur... , the EU allocated 646 million euros to be spent on the Rural Development Programme in Northern Ireland 2014-2020. Not sure how that compares to UK government spending.

Edit: http://ec.europa.eu/unitedkingdom/sites/unitedkingdom/files/... gives a total of 3.5 billion euros EU funding in the same time frame, but only 228 million in the RDP, which made me realize that the 646 million above include 417 million of national co-funding, which I guess means the UK government.

Edit 2: According to https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/conservative-and-... the UK government has made £2.5 billion available to Northern Ireland over 3 years, which works out to almost twice the amount provided by the EU on a yearly basis. That also squares with the similar proportions for the RDP funding alone.


Presumably some of that is the £1 billion that May promised the DUP to get their votes.


This is the funny thing about NI - it's portrayed as a catastrophic loss for UK prestige if Ireland were to unite, whereas there are plenty of politicians, civil servants etc. that would be happier if it were no longer the UK's problem, and the remainder of the UK would be better off as a consequence. The same can almost be said of Scotland - England/Wales taxpayers would be better off without it, for example.


People do not always vote in their economic best interests.




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