Boris Johnson wants to put "alternative arrangements" for the Border between the UK and Ireland back on the agenda, a move that looks set to revive talk of "max fac" and "Canada-style" trade deals to replace the backstop.

The problem is that outside a narrow clique of Brexiteers in the European Research Group these ideas have already been tested and found to be wanting either because the technology doesn't work, they are overly expensive and burdensome or because they simply don't address the problem.

The whole purpose of the backstop has been to avoid infrastructure and checks on the Border, and if the UK chooses a future economic relationship with the EU that is based on WTO terms, then a hard Border will have to be put in place.

"What the EU cannot prevent is the creation of a hard Border on mainland Ireland when we crash out. Pretending otherwise is another Brexit fantasy," Simon Wren-Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Economics and Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, wrote on Tuesday.

The oft-repeated line that the US-Canada border is a model for the application of technology that will produce an invisible and frictionless border ignores the real queues on the border, as well as the real hard infrastructure that is in place between the two countries.

The Detroit-Windsor crossing represents the highest number of loaded truck container crossings at 1.6 million a year between the US and Canada and the bulk of that trade comes from the global auto industry that is part of a huge supply across the borders of Mexico, Canada and the United States where parts and components can cross borders as many as eight times before final assembly.

"The experience is still that of a hard border crossing," said Katy Hayward, a Reader in Sociology at Queen's University Belfast and a specialist in issues surrounding the Border here.

High-value goods made by large corporations which can deal with the complexities of cross-border regulation and be enrolled in trusted trader schemes could not be further from the reality of rural Border Ireland, a poor region where trade is dominated by farm products and myriad small and micro-sized companies.

The Department for the Economy estimates cross-border import and export firms at 11,000 and says that 98.8pc of these are small and medium sized enterprises.

According to Intertrade Ireland, 82pc of cross-border traders have not prepared for no deal. Intertrade said that in 2015, the latest data for deliveries going both ways, there were over a million cross-border deliveries.

In among these, estimates are that milk tankers cross the Border about 33,000 times a year as around a third of the milk from the North is processed in this State.

But the issues for food products are of a different order than car brake pads, thanks to regional standards, with the EU famously rejecting America's chlorinated chickens or use of hormones in beef.

"Technology alone does not address the key challenges related to agri foods… When it comes to questions of meat and milk then they will require proper checks and documentation," said Dr Hayward.

That is why, for example, the Swiss border model cited by arch-Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg doesn't tally with the freedom from EU regulations that the UK is seeking with Brexit, as Swiss regulations on food and agriculture are aligned with those of the bloc.

As for the idea that border infrastructure could be placed well away from the actual Border so as to avoid the risk of it causing security issues, the farther away it is, the less effective it is in food quarantine and other enforcement measures.

London, however, does not appear to have come up with any firm suggestions.

The UK government has held five meetings of its Technical Alternative Arrangements Advisory Group, which was set up to explore ways to replace the backstop by the end of 2020. "Our important work on finding alternative arrangements to the backstop continues. Yesterday the technical group of experts in trade and customs held a productive workshop on farming and food," Brexit Secretary Steve Barclay tweeted on August 13.

But there were no firm proposals and October 31 this year looms.

Irish Independent