Brexit: this week’s Davis downsides

Significant downsides have been a bit scarce this week, presumably because the papers are preoccupied with the election, which goes from bad to worse for the Conservatives. According to the FT, the party has all but given up on red wall seats in the north. Activists and even candidates arebeing redirected by Conservative HQ to shore up safe seats in the south, including that of Foreign Secretary James Cleverly in Braintree (majority in 2019: 25,000). Make of that what you will.

There were several bizarre contributions to the campaign from Brexiters this week who are clearly alarmed that their failing project is about to be cancelled.

Cabinet minister Kemi Badenoch appeared to be supporting her opponents, revealing to Telegraph readers that Keir Starmer intends to reverse Brexit, a policy that 60% of the population would be more than happy to see Labour adopt. Voters in her Saffron Walden constituency have no doubt taken note.

Also in The Telegraph, Lord Frost, in what looks like an election-losing strategy, seems to accuse voters of being too dim to recognise what a stunning success Brexit has been. Britain should be proud of Brexit – a project that is very far from ‘failing’, he tells his followers.

The OBR’s estimate of a £100bn (4%) fall in GDP by 2035, worth about £40bn to The Treasury – equivalent to an 8p rise in income tax – is dismissed as a “likely small hit from disentangling ourselves from the single market and customs union”. The disasters predicted by so many, Lord Frost said, have simply not happened, so “when the critics got so much wrong before, why should we believe them now?”.

Self-awareness was never his strong suit was it?

And in The Times, Brexiter Iain Martin says in a headline for the ages: You may hate Brexit but it’s working out well. Martin describes the OBR’s gloomy GDP forecast as “shaky” and “at worst it has made surprisingly little difference”.

On trade, he prefers the figures provided by Catherine McBride formerly of Legatum and now at the Centre for Brexit Policy which I assume he doesn’t believe are flaky. He claims exports and imports have increased by 11% since 2016. Curiously, McBride uses ONS figures in her own article which clearly show goods exports to the EU are lower than 2016 and imports basically flatlining.

Martin, by the way, is the same man who pre-referendum toured the TV studios campaigning for a leave vote but breaking into a cold sweat at the thought of anyone asking the question ‘which EU laws would you scrap?’ He later admitted having no idea but said in 2021: “In fields such as finance, trade and life science there were and are nerdy Brexiteers who can produce lists of Brussels red tape that needs to be slashed to improve competitiveness.”

I wonder what happened to those nerdy Brexiters with their lists of red tape that “need to be slashed”? Badenoch would have liked to hear from them. She has spent the last fifteen months in the business department in an almost fruitless search for these mysterious EU regulations.

This week we added another 11 downsides to the dossier

Manufacturing

Steve Toon, a Gloucester-based guitar maker says Brexit has meant exporting his high-end products has gone from 48 hours to three weeks. Shipping costs have increased from £60 to £240 with his hand-crafted items often turning up late and “trashed”. Toon said:

“It’s become actually quite difficult to trade. My European sales have dropped off by 50%.”

However, he does not want to rejoin the EU but wants politicians to ‘come up with a plan’ to get his guitars across the channel in under a month. Good luck with that Mr Toon.

Economy

The pro-EU think tank UK in a Changing Europe says the UK became more dependent on trade with the EU in 2023. The EU’s share of total UK trade in goods and services significantly declined in the lead-up to the end of the Brexit transition period but last year both EU goods and services rebounded, with EU goods now comprising 52% of total UK goods trade.

UKICE say while this might appear as if trade with the EU dramatically increased in 2023, the real reason is that trade with non-EU countries fell at such a rate that the EU reclaimed a majority share of total trade.

UKICE also claim Labour’s plans to improve the UK’s trading relationship with Europe will have a “minimal” impact on reducing the economic costs of Brexit. In a new report, they found plans to seek “mainly technical agreements” to improve the EU-UK trade deal, including cutting red tape on food exports and visas for travelling musicians, would only “sand away at the sharpest edges” of the problems caused by Brexit.

The Tholos Foundation, a free-market US think tank, says Britain has fallen from 4th place in the Global Trade Barrier index in 2021 to 8th place in 2023. Tholos says, due to Brexit, the UK was the most improved in the tariff section, allowing it to be ranked 4th overall but because the percentage of duty free tariff lines was not as high as initially reported, Britain dropped to 8th, the same position it held in 2019.

A report from the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics claims that in real terms, UK exports and imports of goods are both lower now than in 2016, having shrunk by 1% and 2%, respectively. The Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) has reduced exports to the EU by around 30% for small firms, but it has had no effect on large firms’ exports to the EU.

Many small firms (perhaps around 20,000) have stopped exporting goods to the EU entirely under the TCA.

All this will probably come as shock to Lord Frost and Iain Martin.

Health

According to inews, in the four-and-a-half years since Brexit, the EU has agreed to ban, restrict, or require clear safety warnings on 46 chemicals compared to the UK which added just one chemical to the watchlists it inherited from Europe – and only after a worldwide ban under the Stockholm Convention, according to an analysis by the Chem Trust charity.

The paper suggests the UK’s more relaxed approach has raised fears that children face greater potential health risks in the future from toxic toys, bouncy playgrounds and artificial turf sports pitches.

A survey by the British Generic Manufacturers Association (BGMA) found almost half of adults in the UK have struggled to get medicine they have been prescribed.

Mark Samuels, CEO of the BGMA, which represents firms producing generic – or off-patent – drugs, which account for 80% of all the drugs the NHS uses across the UK says:

“Several factors are contributing to the problem and the Brexit agreement is definitely one of them.”

Food

According to the BBC, fishermen in Devon and Cornwall feel they have been let down by Brexit and say they have lost trust in politicians ahead of the general election.

They wanted Brexit to deliver an increase in fish stock but instead had got more paperwork, citing the introduction of a mandatory catch app to record catches before they are landed, new vessel monitoring systems, inspections and the requirement of medical certificates.

Fisherman Graham Nicholas said life post-Brexit had been difficult.

Citizens/culture

The Spanish husband of a British woman who had lived in the UK since 2016 has been deported to Spain after he was detained at Leeds Bradford Airport following a trip to visit his elderly mother in Spain.

Aimee Grossman’s husband Gines Rodriguez, 45, was removed from the UK last week. He had applied to live in the UK under the EU settlement scheme but missed the June 2021 deadline and his case is thought to have been rejected due a lack of evidence outlining why it was ‘late’.

Since Britain left the EU, zoos have struggled to participate in breeding swaps designed to help vulnerable and endangered species. Bernie, a spectacled bear and one of the star attractions at Chester Zoo has seen the downside of Brexit. He has been waiting for two years for the correct paperwork allowing him to move to Germany and mate with a female bear.

A spokesperson for Chester Zoo said: “Prior to Brexit, this would have been in place in 6-8 weeks.”

Fashion

UK fashion designers are ‘decamping’ to Milan according to The Guardian. Olya Kuryshchuk, the founder and editor-in-chief of 1 Granary, a fashion education platform and creative network, is doubtful that the Italian city can steal Paris’s crown. “With London rapidly losing its advantages primarily due to Brexit, Paris will stay the most important hub for independent brands as that is where the majority of the buying is happening”, she says.