The political journalist and avid Brexiter Isabel Oakeshott has been ridiculed on social media this week for a bizarre rant in the Daily Telegraph. Oakeshott, as you probably know, is the partner of multi-millionaire Richard Tice, MP for Boston and Skegness and deputy leader of Reform UK Company Limited. She claims her life is made a misery by having to drink spring water from PET bottles equipped with a tethered cap, as prescribed by EU 2019/904, part of the single-use plastics directive which came into force on 3 July.
Plastic bottles with tethered caps
If this is all she has to worry about you might think either her existence is a pretty sheltered one or she is remarkably clumsy, so much so that she’s incapable of doing what most primates can. That is, open a plastic bottle and consume the contents without “spillage, scratched skin or lacerated lips”.
I am inclined to think the issue is less to do with the tethered cap mechanism than the rule imposing it coming out of Brussels, notwithstanding the fact it was approved in June 2019 while the UK was still a member although it was never transposed into British law. Oakeshott admits there is an environmental problem but slams the design and says post-Brexit, we shouldn’t be “subject to pettifogging EU rules and regulations” and that “we should be free to side-step this stuff”.
And therein lies the issue. We can’t avoid it. What she describes is the so-called Brussels effect and Britain’s new status as a rule-taker, which I assume she must have been warned about before 2016 and since.
The tethered cap rule was always bound to impact Britain because we import so much mineral water from France. Volvic and Evian (both owned by the French multinational company Danone) are the top two brands in the UK and Volvic alone produces one billion bottles each year, of which half goes for export. They aren’t going to supply us with different bottles just for Oakeshott’s benefit.
French companies don’t dominate the UK market because we prefer drinking their water but because of huge investments in high-speed automated bottling plants. They can bottle, palletise, wrap and transport water to Britain cheaper than we can do it ourselves. France is also home to companies like Sidel with more than 5,000 employees, owned by the Swedish firm Tetra-Laval, producing liquid filling machines and the complete packaging lines that mineral water businesses rely on.
Mirroring EU rules
Elsewhere, Labour’s announcement that the UK intends to ‘mirror’ EU rules in future to avoid additional costs for businesses and provide regulatory stability is widely misunderstood. Andrew Hesselden said on X (formerly Twitter) that this “synchronisation of UK and EU standards” would remove a “significant barrier in the trade of goods”.
Errr, no it won’t.
UK exporters will still have to ensure their products comply with EU standards and carry a CE mark. That has been the case since we left the single market. What our own domestic standards are or might be in the future is irrelevant.
And for importers, the previous government had already announced that the CE mark would be accepted in the UK indefinitely so nothing changes there either. Synchronising with the EU will save the cost of duplicated standards but won’t make cross-border trade any easier.
What synchronising with EU rules does do, as Niall Ó Conghaile writing in East Anglia Bylines this week says, is raise the question: if we are aligning unilaterally anyway, “why not get the benefit at the border?” This clearly means joining the single market at the very least.
And then, for those who argued we only joined a common market in 1973, the inevitable acknowledgement that the single market rules are political choices made by the political institutions, which we will also need to rejoin to have any influence over them.
Brexit downsides
This week we added another 11 downsides bringing the total to 1,906.
Borders
Singer Kim Wilde has been forced to find “ways around” the Brexit restrictions on musicians travelling around the EU. She told BANG Showbiz when asked if she and her backing group had been hit by the fallout from the 2020 referendum vote to quit the bloc: “We have found ways around it. There have been some issues that needed sorting out, some complications from time to time. But, luckily, nothing we haven’t been able to overcome.”
Her remarks come after a survey found almost half of UK musicians and workers in the music industry have had less work in the EU since Brexit than before it.
Amid warnings of long delays at entry points into Britain, the EU has announced a delay in the implementation date of the European entry/exit system (EES) from 6 October to 10 November. Getlink, the operator of Le Shuttle, which takes vehicles through the Channel tunnel, has spent €78mn (£66mn) providing new facilities to ensure a smooth introduction. It expects EES will mean an additional six to seven minutes to process a carful of passengers, reports The Guardian.
Nichola Mallon, head of trade at Logistics UK, a lobby group for the freight industry, has warned that “time is running out” and that there was an “urgent need” for the government to share its modelling on EES congestion at ports like Dover. Mallon said: “If [lorries are] bringing GB exports across, which are perishable goods, every hour that sits in the back of the lorry, the lower shelf life and the lower its value and the increased risk, you have of wastage.”
According to the Daily Telegraph, Spain is about to impose a hard border on Gibraltar in the absence of a Brexit deal for the Rock, authorities in Gibraltar have warned.
Residents have been told they will face full Brexit border controls, including a 90-day limit on visa-free travel to the EU every 180 days, for the first time once new EU border systems are in place in November, after talks aimed at finding an agreement reached deadlock.
Transport
One Air, the UK’s sole operator of B747 freighters, is lobbying the government to establish a bilateral agreement with the EU to ease post-Brexit bottlenecks. These include difficulties in hiring pilots and engineers and accessing maintenance facilities due to the UK’s exit from the EU Aviation Safety Agency. Non-executive director Paul Simmons revealed the lack of reciprocity in professional qualifications between the UK and EU following Brexit has led to increased costs and operational inefficiencies for One Air, impacting its growth.
The Daily Telegraph carries a story of a Cotswold couple who moved to France to afford their own home without being saddled with a huge mortgage. The piece is sub-titled: Britons ditch the land of red tape to pursue dream of home ownership on the continent. Phil and Kirsti Coley say the move also created business opportunities unaffordable back home.
Coley claimed: “The barriers to starting your own retail business with high street frontage in France compared to the UK are hugely different. In the UK I could expect to pay between £15,000 to £20,000 in rates a year for this type of premises which we’ve turned into office and workshop space with a coffee shop. Here, it’s just £1,000 a year.”
Government
A research briefing for the House of Commons Library puts the Treasury’s latest estimate of the UK’s divorce bill, agreed as part of the 2019 withdrawal agreement, at £30.2bn with £23.8bn of that having been paid as of December 2023.
This excludes £2.9bn of contributions still owing to the European Development Fund until the current programme ends in 2026. The gross figure was £48.6bn less £18.4bn of receipts.
Sir Alex Younger a former MI6 chief, has told ITV that Britain has been “marginalised” by Brexit. He said: “Putin would’ve been absolutely delighted by our decision (to leave the EU) and so would Xi.” Sir Alex added that when he travels around Europe, he is profoundly depressed. “Just nobody mentions the UK. We’ve made ourselves irrelevant. And this is extraordinary. The beginning part of this century, we were the dominant force. France has effectively eclipsed us and you just don’t hear a discussion of us.”
The UK’s scheme allowing EU citizens to remain post-Brexit is in danger of being upended, legal experts have warned, after a series of contradictory court rulings over social welfare payments to French and Slovenian citizens and the relative of a Spanish woman living in Britain. In May, a judge found against Islington Council over the removal of a Slovenian software engineer’s right to emergency housing after he lost work during the pandemic. But in another case, in February, brought against Oldham council on behalf of a woman whose Spanish daughter was living in the UK, the judge found exactly the opposite.
Food
Liz Webster, founder of Save British Farming, a lobby group campaigning to rejoin the single market, has blamed Brexit for a crisis in Britain’s berry-growing sector. British Berry Growers (BBG), representing more than 95% of locally-grown berries sold in the UK, found almost half of growers (47%) reported not making a profit, suggesting that 40% could go out of business by the end of 2026.
Webster says “Brexit removed food subsidies and labour supply, pushing inflation further. Brexit also added trade barriers for exports reducing the market for sales”.
Citizens
An Italian citizen working as a police office in Manchester has been forced to quit his job after the salary threshold to sponsor his Italian wife to live in post-Brexit UK was raised to £29,000.
Dani (not his full name), has been in the UK since 2017 and has full settled status under the post-Brexit residency scheme for EU citizens but, one year into a two-year probation period training to be a detective, he earns only £26,000, £3,000 short of the sum needed to act as sponsor to bring a foreign family member into the country.
