The 2024 election campaign is in full swing with no sign of a bounce in Conservative fortunes, in fact rather the opposite. An early MRP survey of 10,000 voters by pollsters Electoral Calculus in conjunction with FindOutNow for The Daily Mail, predicts the governing party will wind up with a rump of 66 seats, edging the LibDems by seven, a result partly attributed to tactical voting.
If true, it promises to be the Conservative’s worst ever electoral defeat and will trigger recriminations like never before.
Voters in the PM’s Richmond constituency could help Rishi Sunak avoid any post-election bloodletting, most of which will be his, by administering the coup de grâce on 4 July. At the moment his formerly safe seat looks to be seriously at risk. Electoral calculus reduces his 2019 majority of over 25,000 down to just 3%.
He could emulate Arthur Balfour, the Conservative prime minister who lost his Manchester East seat in the Liberal landslide of 1906 when his party shed 246 of their 402 MPs. Compared to Sunak, that result will look soon like a victory.
The Conservative brand has become toxic. Many Tory MP’s in recent by-elections have produced literature which fails to identify them as Tories and doesn’t come in the traditional blue. There have been several high-profile defections to Labour and now Robert Largan, the Tory MP for High Peak until a few days ago, is promoting himself as a Labour candidate:
If a Conservative can’t admit to being a Conservative, what future is there for the party?
Brexit and the polls
In a similar vein, Conservative central office finally appear to be making the obvious connection between Brexit and the party’s appalling poll numbers. The flagship policy, which they have spent the last decade shoving down our throats, is now unmentionable. The 2019 ‘Get Brexit done’ election has been erased from history.
Jill Rutter of the Institute for Government received a six-page Tory campaign leaflet which doesn’t contain any reference to Brexit at all.
It’s said the first step in solving any problem is to recognise you’ve got one. This is therefore a telling moment, the party’s tacit acceptance that Brexit is a vote loser. It’s the start of a long but inevitable journey towards the repudiation of Brexit.
Given that we keep adding downsides to the dossier, with few upsides, it’s unsurprising the Tories want to play it down. More difficult to explain is Labour’s refusal to capitalise on what is now widely seen as the nation’s worst foreign policy mistake since Suez.
This week we added another dozen to the bulging dossier.
The economy
The FT reports that the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) say tighter migration rules and rising costs and complexity of exports were throttling investment and growth.
BCC director-general Shevaun Haviland claimed the constant addition of new EU rules was making life ever-harder for exporters and their suppliers. Haviland said: “We thought that after year one things would just get easier for people as they worked out what the problems were, but actually the changes just kept coming.”
Professor Jonathan Portes for the think-tank UK in a Changing Europe says recent falls in UK immigration levels, although at 685,000 still very high, have “major implications for the public finances.”
He quotes OBR figures forecasting that a ‘low migration’ scenario would push up borrowing by about £14bn per year in 2028-29 and raise the debt to GDP ratio – the government’s key fiscal target – by about 2.5%, or about £75bn.
With freedom of movement, immigration responded quickly and easily to changing economic circumstances, but attempting to micro-manage things is proving far more difficult than Brexiters imagined.
Sally-Ann Hart, a Tory MP who campaigned for Brexit has joined calls to ease the ban on travel to the UK by European school groups with ID cards. Hart, who represents Hastings and Rye, told The Independent that it was “vital” that barriers to restoring inbound tourism are removed. Her constituency has seen a collapse in school groups from the EU who previously stayed in the town while on English-language courses.
Clarence House, the king’s London home, will not be open to tourists this summer because of staff shortages in the royal household caused by Brexit and the pandemic.
Bernard Donoghue, director of the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions, says, “It is much harder since Brexit to recruit. It’s a real problem, given that tourism is the fifth biggest industry and the third largest generator of exports.”
Citizens
The BBC claims that from October, coaches arriving at Dover for Channel crossings will be directed to the Western docks, away from the main check-in areas, where new kiosks to register passenger details for the EU’s biometric entry/exit system are to be located.
Doug Bannister, the port’s CEO, says passengers will need to disembark, pass through the border, re-board their coach and continue to the ferry terminal. He added: “As long as the seal’s intact the coach will proceed directly around to check-in.”
By summer 2025, the plan is to relocate car processing to the Western docks too. This relies on an old dock being filled in to create more land. There are plans to make even more holding space around the port by September 2027.
In another sign of the problems that borders create, passengers using the juxtaposed UK Border Force e-gates at Paris’ Gare du Nord station were delayed for several hours on Thursday due to an IT failure. One passenger, Karen Fletcher, told The Independent there was “Total chaos at Gare du Nord.”
Welcome to Britain.
Northern Ireland
Cross-border trade between Northern Ireland and the Republic continues to grow as a result of Brexit.
InterTradeIreland, says businesses in the north and the Republic that traded with both sides of the border are in a stronger position than those who only trade in their own markets. According to Ireland’s Central Statistics Office, cross-border trade in 2022 was valued at €10.3bn (£8.8bn), up €2.5bn on 2021, a 32% increase.
Financial services
The CEO of Docusign, the e-signature company with 1,000,000 paying customers and over a billion users worldwide, says Brexit and British red tape have stifled dealmaking in the UK, making it much slower compared to the US.
Allan Thygesen, told City AM that Brexit and the regulatory and compliance issues that have come with it “just adds burden” to operating in the UK. The company on the other hand is “very bullish on Europe” which Thygesen thinks is the biggest growth market outside the US.
Food
The organisers of a the world’s largest food awards event have been forced to hold a judging panel outside the UK for the first time in its 30-year history to avoid post-Brexit import controls.
On Sunday, judges from the Guild of Fine Foods travelled to Co Tipperary in Ireland to spend three days tasting products that have become much harder to bring to the UK. John Farrand, MD of the guild said: “We’re a bellwether for the wider problems in the market. It’s irritating for us because it’s going to cost us a lot more money to go and judge in Ireland.”
Borders
The Spanish Government has suggested that uniformed and armed officers from Policia Nacional must carry out border controls at Gibraltar airport, seaport and the marina, if a treaty is to be agreed.
Madrid is insisting that responsibility for entry to Schengen must be controlled by Policia Nacional, with Frontex, the EU’s border force, serving only in an auxiliary capacity.
Government
In another embarrassing regulatory climbdown, the UK government has extended the range of product regulations that will continue to follow current EU rules.
Firms will be able to use either the UKCA or CE marking to sell a range of products in Great Britain indefinitely although the UK will have no influence in the EU regulations themselves. No prizes for guessing with marking firms will opt for.
The range now covers an extra 21 product regulations including 18 owned by the Department for Business and Trade (DBT). Following industry feedback a further three regulations, covering ecodesign, civil explosives and, in most circumstances, restriction of hazardous substances (in electrical equipment) are also included.
Environment
With the ending of EU cross-compliance in December last year, the requirement for farmers to abide by the no-cut season for hedgerows and buffer strips alongside agricultural land no longer applies in the UK.
Environmentalists must now rely on the goodwill and green credentials of farmers to maintain hedgerows that benefit wildlife and provide shelter. Defra has completed a survey showing overwhelming support for extending the hedgerow management protections but there is now no time for parliament to incorporate the lost no-cut and buffer strip rules into UK legislation before the election.
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