Unsurprisingly, the Conservative Party conference in Manchester has rather swamped the media this week but nevertheless 15 downsides were added to the dossier. Before we get to them we need to mention the conference, which by all accounts reaching the bunker could have been mistaken for UKIP’s conference, circa 2014.
Held in the Central Convention Complex (commonly known as GMEX), a building which started life in 1880 as Manchester Central Railway Station, it was perhaps not the wisest choice of venue for the prime minister to announce that he was scrapping the city’s high speed rail link to the capital (or Old Oak Common unless the private sector coughs up the money).
Portraying himself with some chutzpah as the ‘change’ candidate, Rishi Sunak proposed to spend all the money saved on a new ‘plan’. This was called ‘Network North’ to distinguish it from all the other earlier failed plans that never got anywhere, and was produced like a rabbit out of a hat after he had spent days denying any decision had been made.
Network North, a cobbled-together alternative to HS2
A 15-year strategy with cross-party political consensus, detailed assessments approved by parliament and local authorities, was being ditched on a whim by an unelected prime minister and replaced by a hastily cobbled-together list of postponed/scrapped/previously announced projects, with a liberal sprinkling of the word ‘could’ and some amateur graphics.
The published text included projects that were already complete before 2015. Extensions to Manchester’s Metro line to the airport and Nottingham’s tram system to Clifton South have already been in use for over seven years. Another project, the Leamside Line in Durham, was actually real but that plan only survived 24 hours before being scrapped itself. Don’t worry though, nobody north of The Wash actually believes any of it will ever happen anyway.
Before that, delegates in half-deserted halls had been treated to a series of vacuous speeches about non-existent threats, from senior Conservatives including ones in the cabinet. Some made Donald Trump look like an intensely focused polymath.
Transport Secretary Mark Harper said we shouldn’t tolerate local councils deciding how often you can go to the shops; a baffling prospect since no one seemed to know what he was talking about. Meanwhile his cabinet colleague Claire Coutinho claimed Labour wanted to tax meat. Penny Mordaunt urged delegates to “stand up and fight” for something, but wasn’t entirely clear quite what. Given the various warring factions in the party, it could easily have descended into a brawl in the auditorium.
The two speakers who were able to pack a room were none other than Liz Truss and the home secretary Suella Braverman, which should tell you all you need to know about the modern Conservative Party.
Priti Patel was spotted singing and dancing alongside Mr Brexit himself, Nigel Farage, who was given a hero’s reception by his former party. Someone said Farage could be a Conservative MP soon and even leader eventually, which would finish off the Tories for decades, something we might all be grateful for.
Immigration
Leading us into the latest downsides we have immigration minister Robert Jenrick who told a fringe meeting in Manchester, sotto voce presumably, that Brexit had caused a “very large” spike in the number of legal migrants, a record 606,000 in 2022 in fact. Jenrick said the government must do more to reduce the number of people coming to the UK, apparently without realising he was a member of the very government he was appealing to, which had issued over 1.1 million visas last year, a near 100% increase over 2019.
And for a brief moment, he broke with his usual mendacity, to tell his audience: “I think it’s true to speak honestly with you that after leaving the European Union we ended up creating a system that was, if anything, more liberal than the one that we had beforehand.”
His boss, Braverman, didn’t have time to mention that. And it’s worth noting that immigration itself is not always a downside.
As far as illegal immigration is concerned, an undercover reporter in Calais was told by a people smuggler that Brexit had made his job easier.
Northern Ireland
The first effects of the Windsor framework were felt in Northern Ireland last weekend when the red and green channels across the Irish Sea border began operations. This was not greeted with unalloyed enthusiasm.
In a statement on his website, Jim Allister, leader of the TUV and not known for his restrained language, attacked the Windsor framework saying the border “depicts a humiliating surrender of sovereignty – an internal border at the behest and under the control of a foreign power”.
Three years after we left the EU, plans have finally been submitted for a permanent border inspection post at Larne in Northern Ireland to enable post-Brexit biosecurity checks on goods moving on to the EU single market (red lane) and to conduct any necessary Windsor framework (green lane) checks on goods remaining in NI.
Tesco became the first major retailer to display ‘Not For EU’ signs next to GB food products sitting on shelves in Northern Ireland, thus providing shoppers there with a subliminal message that British plant and animal produce is perhaps inferior, tainted in some way even before the sell-by date. The goods themselves will also need to carry labels with the same message, the retail equivalent of shouting ‘don’t pick me’ at passing customers.
To help UK businesses with the cost of these new food labelling requirements the government is to offer retrospective grants for firms who can show additional labelling costs. Up to £50mn is to be made available from January to March next year, open to businesses enrolled in the Northern Ireland Retail Movement Scheme (NIRMS).
The Windsor framework has been described as a “disaster” by Owen Polley, co-author of the paper: An Agenda for Northern Ireland After Brexit published by Global Britain at 55 Tufton Street, London, the address where Brexit was conceived and planned. What an irony, eh?
Writing in CapX, Polley claims smaller retail outlets in the province won’t bother to import British food because of all the extra hassle and large chains have already said they won’t use the green channel for many products. It may be that sales of UK processed foods will diminish naturally over time until cross border trade with GB disappears altogether when Brexit will finally be ‘done’.
Music and the arts
British tenor Christopher Willoughby describes Brexit as “an absolute nightmare”. He says the barriers to work and travel introduced by Brexit have been “financially stressful; stressful in terms of the immigration process; stressful for my family and friends. Not a day goes by when I’m not worrying about it”.
It turns out that technicians travelling with bands touring Europe now have to apply to HMRC for a certificate proving they pay national insurance in the UK, an ‘arduous’ process that can take between eight weeks and six months. This is to avoid having the EU promoter hold back part of their wages in case a liability arises in the EU member state or states visited.
The LibDem MP for Sutherland and Caithness, Jamie Stone, has called on the UK government to reduce the red tape which has led to the cancellation of exhibitions and delays for art moving to and from Europe.
Trade
Confirmation has been forced out of the Cabinet Office that new post-Brexit border controls on animal and plant products imported from the EU will cost UK businesses. Labour MP Stella Creasey was told there would be an estimated £330mn a year in additional red tape charges alone. This is in terms of fees and doesn’t include all the extra time spent by exporters filling in forms.
The CEO of Elem Biotech, a tech business with operations in Bristol and Barcelona, says Brexit has made expanding the British side a challenge. Chris Morton now prefers to invest in the Catalan city for the “quality of the people you get for the salaries that you have to pay”.
The FT report that because a number of environmental initiatives have been weakened in the UK, British exporters face hundreds of millions of pounds in EU carbon border taxes over the next decade. Marcus Ferdinand, chief analytics officer at carbon consultancy Veyt, told the newspaper: “UK industry will still be paying for emissions on exports to the EU, but instead of taxes going to the Treasury, they will be heading to Brussels.”
Exporters have also been warned that they face more changes in the next 15 months than at the start of 2021 when the new post-Brexit trading arrangements first came into effect. The Institute of Export and International Trade has identified more than 20 separate measures within UK and European legislation that will affect exporters, importers, and their logistics providers, reports The Times.
The economy
Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey, in a wide ranging interview with Prospect magazine, says the short-term consequences of the UK leaving the EU are indeed negative. “If you reduce the openness of an economy, in the short run it will have negative effects. It will have a negative effect on productivity, it will have a negative effect on growth … you don’t need to take my word for it, you can go back to Adam Smith and David Ricardo,” Bailey said.
He also added that “much” of the City of London, has “remained intact” and “much” of the industry “remains here” which seems to fall short of Brexit having any kind of positive impact.
Citizens
Finally, The Daily Telegraph claims a “Brexit passport glitch” at the DVLA in Swansea is to blame for post-Brexit passport-holders being unable to renew their driving licences online. The problem affects all passports issued since 2016, including the estimated 15 million new blue UK passports. The report says the fault was caused by the removal of digital signatures from passports in 2016 designed to speed up online passport applications by scrapping the need to sign extra forms and print photos.
Again, no upsides were reported.
