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Boris Johnson compared the Irish border to Camden and Islington – our favourite 19 responses online

John Plunkett. Updated February 27th, 2018

Boris Johnson confused people even more than he usually does today when he compared the challenge of avoiding a hard border in Northern Ireland to the boundaries between different boroughs of London.

The future of the Irish border has loomed large in the Brexit negotiations with the UK planning to leave the EU’s customs union but without physical checks between Northern Ireland and the Republic.

Here’s what Johnson told Radio 4 today.

And if you can’t bear to him speak, here’s what he had to say.

“We think that we can have very efficient facilitation systems to make sure that there’s no need for a hard border, excessive checks at the frontier between Northern Ireland and the Republic.

“There’s no border between Islington or Camden and Westminster… but when I was mayor of London we anaesthetically and invisibly took hundreds of millions of pounds from the accounts of people travelling between those two boroughs without any need for border checks whatever.”

“It’s a very relevant comparison because there’s all sorts of scope for pre-booking, electronic checks, all sorts of things that you can do to obviate the need for a hard border to allow us to come out of the customs union, take back control of our trade policy and do trade deals.”

And here’s what everyone else had to say in response, our favourite replies online today.

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