thecrashingisles

Alternatively if Ireland wanted to join Schengen they could make Schengen membership a condition of our reaccession.

GE17 is very debatable. May called it because she said Labour, the Lib Dems and the SNP were frustrating Brexit and during the campaign Labour didn't mention Brexit at all which allowed them to consolidate the anti-Brexit vote without giving the Tories a target.

The people voting against it would still vote against it even if there were no backstop because they'd say we're paying £39bn for nothing.

There’s no car manufacturing in Australia at all now because the size of the market doesn’t justify it. The idea that being outside the single market will protect manufacturing in the UK is absurd.

So France isn’t a real country? Or Ireland if you want a more directly comparable example?

It's not as simple as that. Once you remove the UK from the EU, the evidence is that the UK will break up.

No Deal = No UK.

Labour aren't going to vote for May's deal, so where do the votes come from?

So when people talk about Merkel's "open borders", are they talking about France, Belgium or Poland?

Borders are generally understood to be external. Saying the EU’s borders are “open” is misleading.

So by that definition any political entity that has internal free movement has "open borders".

With who?

Remain does not mean "open borders". The EU does not have open borders, and wage levels are rapidly equalising, growing 14% in Romania in the last year for example.

You're still missing the point. Are Orban and Salvini planning to erect customs barriers with their neighbours and adopt independent trade policies? No, and they won't do. The existence of a shared European legal order is simply too embedded to disappear. The EU isn't held together by force but by day to day reality.

That shows you have no idea what the disintegration of the EU would mean in practical terms which is why you vastly overestimate the possibility of it happening. There is no appetite among EU member states to “take back control” of the things the EU delivers.