How the UK government can solve the Brexit stand-off over Northern Ireland

As Sam Lowe at the Centre for European Reform think-tank explains here, such a Swiss-style deal would leave the UK “permanently bound to EU food hygiene rules”, but in return there would be no more need for export health certificates and the reams of other red tape currently strangling UK businesses.

Indeed, such an agreement could be freely entered into by the UK as a “sovereign power”, and freely exited, with a year’s notice, if the UK decided that it wanted to do so, obviously accepting the consequences as it did so.  It would also not, Lowe says, impede Britain’s ability to strike trade deals with the rest of the world, except the US.