Hello my name is David Runseman and this is Talking Politics. This week an extra episode

Helen and I are going to try and make sense of where we are with Brexit.

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We are now a few days on from the really interesting series of votes in the House of Commons

as various amendments fell one by one until the Brady amendment passed. The next day

on Wednesday I travelled to Ireland in a day there and back to Dublin.

On the way there this was the morning after the night before I read the not the British

papers. I think we have to call them the English papers. That were celebrating Theresa's

triumph and on the way back I read the Irish newspapers from the same day that were

bmonning Theresa's betrayal and the Irish Times one of their columnists I thought made

the perfectly reasonable point that the reason we need a backstop is precisely because

the British government has decided that they can renegotiate the backstop because the

whole point of it is to provide security that is people's confidence in the future that

the border will not become a hard border. And putting those terms it does make it look

really hard for Theresa May to persuade Brussels which means at some level persuading the

Irish government that this question can be reopened because there is a point to the backstop

from the Irish point of view. They cannot be confident that British politics will not

really mess them around unless they have that security. But it just it partly sounds paradoxical

kind of we need the backstop because British government is saying we don't need the backstop

...