It has been another eventful week down here in the bunker. To mark the fourth anniversary of Brexit, the government published a fancy 24 page brochure with a foreword by business secretary Kemi Badenoch.
Anyone reading through it might be forgiven for thinking she had drafted it up whilst on mind-altering substances as she regaled us with what seemed largely fictional tales of “Britain’s Brexit Success.” However, outside the imagination of Badenoch and back here on planet Earth, IPSOS also published the results of a poll commissioned by The Evening Standard which found 57% of adults in the UK believe Brexit has been more of a failure, with just 13% saying it has been more of a success.
And it isn’t hard to see who has the better grip on reality. Trade talks with Canada collapsed over cheese, ministers were warned that costly new import checks are going to increase food inflation and reduce choice and the deal agreed with the DUP to persuade them to return to Stormont is just another reminder of the intractable nature of the Irish trilemma.
The FT take on it is: Four years on and Brexit still isn’t ‘done’ and The Guardian’s editorial on Wednesday says with some justification that, “No one believes any longer that Brexit was ‘done’ in 2019. The question of which parts of it need undoing will only get more urgent”.
They are both well-informed, sober opinion pieces as is David Gauke’s in The New Statesman. He says: Brexit is not as secure as it appears, and voters have concluded that “leaving the EU was a mistake because all the government can offer is damage limitation”.
New Brexit border checks
There are all sorts of alarms being sounded at the prospects of the five-times-delayed import checks beginning to be applied to EU imports as of 31 January. These range from delays to cut flowers and fresh food, reducing shelf life, to the shortage of vets in Europe needed to issue health certificates. This is in addition to all the extra costs.
Others fear bio security is being put at risk because of cuts to border funding and the location of the main inspection post for the port of Dover being located 22 miles inland at Sevington in Kent.
The best comment to my mind came from @Ginger_Elvis88 responding to a tweet from Lord Frost hailing the re-establishment of Britain as a “true national democracy in which national elections really matter”.
So much for Britain’s world-beating border.
The DUP
The 80-page command paper published as part of the DUP deal announced this week has seen a consensus develop that it’s more about ‘window dressing’ than anything really substantial, although any progress, however small, is always welcome.
Several senior Westminster colleagues of DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson have already criticised the paper and Lord Dodds has pointed out the deal does not do away with the sea border and intermediate goods for NI businesses and anything without a known endpoint in Northern Ireland will still be subject to the full panoply of EU border checks.
Steve Peers, professor of EU law at Royal Holloway University claims much of it is either already in the Windsor framework or permitted and even anticipated by it. He suggests the policy of HM government is to “announce as little as possible as loudly as possible” which sums it all up well, I think.
REUL Law
The government quietly sneaked out another report the other day on how much retained EU law has been scrapped, amended, or replaced. It must be slightly embarrassing for Badenoch, since it reveals just how little progress has actually been made over the last four years and how little is now expected, given assurances made to the DUP about embedding “proper scrutiny” where new regulation “could lead to red tape or barriers for trade between the constituent parts of the UK”.
For an independent opinion perhaps the best place to go is the UK Constitutional Law Association’s website and an article by Kenneth Armstrong, professor of European law at Cambridge and a fellow of Sidney Sussex College. Amazingly, despite all the efforts of ministers, there are actually more EU laws now on the UK statute book (6,757) than there were when the whole process started (2,417).
This is the first bonfire in history that has grown in size after it was lit.
The report anticipates that 44%, or 3012 measures, will be “assimilated permanently” into UK law. As Professor Armstrong points out, this is higher than the total number that the government first thought constituted the entire body of retained EU Law.
Who knew?
This week there were 12 new additions to the dossier, including one rare upside.
Food
Britain’s food and food supply chains figure prominently this week.
As already mentioned the cross-party Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee (EFRA) has written to the environment secretary Steve Barclay expressing ‘serious concerns‘ about the loss of funding to carry out biosecurity checks and also questioning the location of the new facility for physical checks at Dover border crossing, which are at Sevington, 22 miles away from the point of entry at Dover at Sevington.
Karin Goodburn of the Chilled Food Association has also written to Barclay expressing more concerns about the level of preparedness at Sevington. She fears that 24/7, 365-days-a-week food supply chains simply don’t work when you have to wait for vets to sign off certificates and then give 24 hours notice of imports. Goodburn said delays could cut the shelf life of fresh food from the EU by a fifth.
The British Meat Processors Association (BMPA) is concerned about a shortage of vets in the EU to carry out checks needed under the new import rules. Peter Hardwick, trade policy adviser at the BMPA, said he believed suppliers would “take the UK government’s rules at face value”, and he expected some big suppliers not to risk their stock or reputation by sending orders without a health certificate.
Ministers have also been warned about the impact on UK inflation of forcing all UK supermarkets to put ‘not for EU’ labels on meat, dairy and plant products. Waitrose has claimed that redesigning the packaging will “add unnecessary costs when we are doing everything we can to keep costs down”.
The irony is that Waitrose don’t even have any stores in Northern Ireland.
There is yet more irony from former Brexit Party MEP June Mummery, now MD of fish market auctioneers BFP Eastern based in Lowestoft, who has told GB News that “UK fishing is on its knees.” Mummery says, “There are still 1,700 EU vessels plundering, unmonitored, unregulated, eight of which are super trawlers”. Paul Lines, chairman of the Lowestoft Fish Market Alliance, said: “when you analyse the TCA agreement, they sold us a pup.” Both, I assume, were supporters of Brexit.
The economy
Anyone who thought British industry would adapt and find a way through the new trade relationship with the EU should read the results of a survey by Bibby Foreign Exchange (BFX) showing that 55% of UK SMEs see ongoing issues as a result of Brexit as a ‘significant challenge’.
Michael McGowan, MD of BFX said:
“Four years on, the Brexit burden is growing, not shrinking, and this is stifling the growth of thousands of UK exporters and importers who also face a myriad of supply-chain issues as a result of conflicts in Europe and the Middle East.”
More disturbing is a report in the FT revealing that 81% of UK-based businesses trading overseas found they faced more complexity today than they did before Brexit, spending an average of nearly £100,000 navigating the new border formalities over the past three years and hitting profits.
Three-quarters reported that sales into the EU had fallen or become more complicated. Alex Baulf, VP of global indirect tax at Avalara, a tax technology firm that commissioned the survey said:
“UK businesses have had less trade with the EU and that’s impacting [their] revenue. Where there is trade, there’s additional cost, which is eating into margins.”
All of which is reinforced by a poll of 2,000 SMEs, members of the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC), showing many are still struggling to rebuild export trade after Brexit and the pandemic, with overseas sales failing to match a recovery in their domestic performance. The BCC said small exporters “have been disproportionately impacted” by headwinds in global trade caused by the Covid crisis and new trade barriers with the EU.
Agriculture
Helen Drinkhall, a beef and sheep farmer based near Chorley in Lancashire is worried she will go out of business after a loss of income has left the farm “treading water”.
The NFU say financial support for farmers has fallen by 37% since Brexit and Drinkhall said the old payment scheme was phased out before the new UK one was ready, limiting the options for upland farms adding that it was “really hard to plan and invest and know where to take the business”.
Environment
Eurostar has come in for criticism for expensive ticket prices, forcing many passengers to take a cheaper but less environmentally friendly plane between London and Paris despite climate concerns and the high-speed rail service connecting the two cities in just over two hours.
The company had said it wants to increase passenger numbers, which could help cut prices, but claim that has become more difficult since Britain’s departure from the EU, with Brexit causing a “bottleneck” at the border.
Health
EU plans to stockpile key medicines is going to worsen the record drug shortages in the UK, according to Dr Andrew Hill, an expert on the pharmaceutical trade.
Dr Hill claims:
“Europe is securing access to key drugs and vaccines as a single region, with huge influence and buying power. As a result of Brexit the UK is now isolated from this system, so our drug supplies could be at risk in the future.”
A rare Brexit upside
The UK government is to end the exporting of live animals and ensure that animals are slaughtered domestically in high welfare UK slaughterhouses, reinforcing the UK’s position as a world leader on animal welfare, boosting the value of British meat and helping to grow the economy.
The animal welfare (livestock exports) bill was introduced in parliament in December last year and will ban the export of live animals including cattle, sheep, and pigs.
