Border Lines

"If migration is the issue that swings voters to leave, consider how a Brexit government would turn against the foreign-born," Polly Toynbee?

Because the EU has been such a success at precluding racism and xenophobia.

Just as it has enabled us to live in the paradise of workers' rights, consumer protection, world class public services, and state-of-the-art infrastructure, with which we are all so familiar.

Today's welfare cuts legislation is of no interest to the Boris Broadcasting Corporation and the rest of the media, so utterly unprofessional that they address him simply as "Boris".

But, like the Cabinet Ministers that he has never been (he was but briefly and unsuccessfully an Opposition frontbencher during his half-forgotten first stint as an MP), all that Johnson wants is a second referendum, but one on terms negotiated to his and their satisfaction.

It is possible that Labour is playing the long game here.

Such terms would be so outrageously unacceptable, even compared to the present ones, that Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell would have to campaign for a vote to reject them, as of course they long to do this time.

There is also the fact that few people in Great Britain, and practically none of the anti-EU Right, could conceive of their country's having a land border.

To them, it is precisely the absence of such neighbours that is the key to their own self-understanding.

The re-enforcement of the United Kingdom's actually existing land frontier as a hard border would boggle their minds, as well as almost certainly being more or less impossible to do these days.

Purely as a matter of fact, it is very highly likely that withdrawal from the EU would be followed in short order by withdrawal from Ireland, entirely regardless of what anyone there might happen to think.