As any self-respecting Brexit pundit will be more than happy to remind us, smart borders featuring mythological things like remote customs declarations and automated number plate checking are simply “unicorns” which aren’t likely to be possible for hundreds, if not thousands of years. They certainly won’t be suitable for any post-Brexit border crossings…

Which is why French Customs have just unveiled a “smart border” – an “innovative technological solution” which will be implemented on 29 March 2019 “at all points of entry/exit to/from the Calais region and at border points from Channel-North Sea to maintain smooth circulation of your goods.” What are they thinking wasting their time on this? If only they’d listened to the commentariat…

The French say their system is based on three principles, which are obviously from the realms of pure fantasy:

• The early completion of customs procedures before arriving at the border by giving the bar code of the customs declaration to the driver.
• The identification of the mean of transport and the bar code of customs declaration of transported goods.
• The automatic sending of the crossing notifications to the customs declarant to avoid stopping the HGV.

The bar codes are linked to the number plates of the HGVs so hauliers have no need to stop, avoiding delays to the vast quantities of goods that pass between the UK and France every day. But of course, none of this could ever possibly work to monitor the tiny quantities of agricultural products and construction materials that cross the Irish border…