Seeing as our politicians are having trouble coming up with a solution for the back-stop, which seems to be the lynchpin for any UK-EU withdrawal agreement, I thought I'd apply some commonsense and see what everyone else thought?

Respecting Principles

• The UK rejects the idea of splitting the UK union

• The EU thinks it's okay to split the UK union

Therefore the EU is not adverse to the idea of splitting unions, otherwise they would not have suggest that we split ours. We are friends after all. So it seems the obvious solution to the back-stop problem is to split the EU union and move the back-stop to the English Channel.

Nice and simple. No hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The hard border would be around the entire British Isles.

UK-ROI trade area

This new back-stop agreement would create a UK-ROI trade block. Pronounced' U-kroy'.

Goods coming into the combined trade area of the UK-ROI would be checked, but goods moving between ROI and UK will not be checked. Goods leaving UK-ROI combined area for the rest of the EU are checked by customs when they turn up in the first EU country outside UK-ROI.

People entering UK-ROI would have to show their passport, but moving within UK-ROI would not require a passport.

Of course, to make this work checks for entry into UK-ROI have to satisfy both Ireland (EU) and the UK. 'Owever, this is no more difficult than cutting a border through the UK, so whatever the EU had planned for the old back-stop can be implemented for this new back-stop. Whatever the EU thought was good enough for us, I'm sure it will also be good enough for them.

I suspect it would be a bit leaky, and Ireland and the UK could only exchange requests to ban a person or goods. However, the goods or person that was banned in one country could re-rout to the other country, and enter that way, and then travel back to the original country they were banned from, but that could be handled with monitoring and flagging on travel. It's not like we do not have enough monitoring systems.

What could possibly go wrong :P

Summery

The EU preserves and protects the integrity of the EU trade area, no checks along a very sensitive political border, and Ireland stays in the EU, and the UK is out of the EU, but everyone working together is peace and harmony....

:D

Post-Brexit border solution