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What's impossible about letting in the Irish, but not other EU members?
A lot of policies end up copy-pasted from the EU anyway, I think that's what happened with the Even More Annoying Cookie Banner Directive. Another curious thing is how all of Europe, including the UK, is now simultaneously passing gender self-ID. To be fair I think the problem is bigger than the EU but also let's not pretend the UK is independent now and it's elites are listening to the people.
Why should it be a surprise when Brexit did, indeed, mean a Brexit - UK exiting the organization called EU - and did not in fact mean all the other stuff that Brexiteers kind of vaguely implicated Brexit would bring, like lower immigration? If anything wouldn't it just prove that EU is actually fairly inconsequential insofar as migrant flows from outside of EU itself are concerned?
Sort of. All official layers of government are inconsequential, the elites coordinate independently from them. Although the EU is deliberately set up in such a way as to allow them to make decisions with minimal input from the people they rule over.
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Well because in order to determine which people and goods are Irish, and which are not (which in itself already creates problems given the free flow of EU goods into Ireland, so the distinctions are not entirely clear), one has to have a 'hard' border, with supervised crossing points etc. in order to carry out the necessary checks. No-one supports such a border because it endangers the Good Friday agreement, and the only other possibility if you want a border somewhere it so check goods moving between NI and the UK.
The transplanting of EU law had to happen. One cannot simply abolish a regulatory framework built up over decades overnight.
I can agree about the goods, that's a lot trickier. People? You can have it half automatized by scanning the cars coming in, and then checking for passports.
How does the regulatory framework require stupid cookie banners, and gender self-ID? These are new / relatively new laws even in the EU itself.
Goods has always been the main sticking point really, and it's integral to the border question.
Maybe? This is what Gove would occasionally to try to square the circle, 'technological solution blah blah blah', but at the current moment it does seem that one does require some physical border presence/infrastructure to keep some people out, so there really is no getting round the Good Friday question. A border must fall somewhere.
The government did not comb through EU regulations one by one (that is hardly plausible), they just transplanted them all directly into UK law with the view that if they wanted to get rid of any they could just do it later, which they still can do (and the usual suspects keep prattling on about a 'bonfire' etc.), but no-one in Britain actually cares about GDPR so they have no compelling reason to really bother.
I'm pretty sure transplanting a law involves more than CTRL+A, CTRL+C, and CTRL+V, so someone is actually combing through these regulations. The easiest thing to do would be to just ignore them. If they are just taking the path of least resistance, like you seem to be implying in the border example, they'd just ignore the cookie banner directive, and self-ID.
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