Brexit: this week’s Davis downsides

As the dust settles following Thursday’s general election there is growing pressure to ditch the creaking first past the post (FPTP) electoral system that delivered some quite bizarre outcomes. Labour won a landslide victory with fewer votes than in 2019 when they achieved their worst result since 1935.

The Tory vote was halved but they lost two thirds of their MPs. The Lib Dems took 72 seats after receiving half a million fewer votes than Reform UK Ltd who ended up with five MPs.

Nigel Farage has already committed to campaigning to getting rid of FPTP, naturally. Proportional representation would have given him around 100 MPs and a real power base.

Tories may conclude they spent the entire six-week campaign attacking the wrong opponent. Had they concentrated their fire on Farage instead of Keir Starmer, they would still have lost, but perhaps with a respectable number of MPs.

However, before we finally say goodbye to FPTP we should reflect on the fact that PR couldn’t have delivered such a satisfying and emphatic blow to Conservatism or prevented far-right parties like Reform achieving a breakthrough. FPTP may not be all that democratic but it has some benefits.

Whither the right?s

Suella Braverman, who retained her seat, conceded defeat before a vote was cast and called for “a searingly honest post-match analysis” but given that her remedy is for the party to “rediscover its soul” and “move back to the right” don’t expect much genuine soul searching until another heavy defeat in 2028/29. There will be plenty of recriminations. Hell hath no fury like a Conservative Party scorned.

The party will be tempted to believe they can recover all their losses next time by simply accepting Farage into the ranks. Sir Edward Leigh, MP for Gainsborough, has openly called for a merger to bring the right together. If that happened, it would spell the end of either the Conservative Party or the country. Which one it is will depend on how crazy the electorate is next time.

Farage’s single greatest attribute is an ability to state and restate problems without proposing any workable solutions, while appearing to drive six-inch nails into a solid oak plank with his head. His real attraction for some voters is that he moans about the same things they do, but in a better way.

Return of the grown ups

What now for Labour? Starmer has made a good start by appointing people with experience and expertise to key positions instead of representatives of one faction or another. The attorney general is a KC, Sir Patrick Vallance, chief scientific adviser to the government during the Covid-19 pandemic, is the new science minister and James Timpson, well known for working with ex-offenders is the prisons minister.

Experts are once again welcome it seems.

Yvette Cooper, who regularly bested Priti Patel and Braverman at the despatch box is home secretary and Ed Miliband who seems to have grown in stature after a disastrous period as Labour leader, takes on a vital role as energy secretary. The capable Sue Gray will become Starmer’s chief of staff. It all bodes well.

The will of the people

How long Starmer’s Brexit policy can survive will be interesting. Sir John Curtice, who as usual predicted the election result with stunning accuracy from an exit poll, is the UK’s outstanding psephologist and has written an article for the think tank UK in a Changing Europe setting out the current state of public thinking on the EU and asking: What do Labour voters want Starmer to do about Brexit?

Professor Curtice points out that overall in the UK, 61% would now vote to rejoin the EU.

Breaking it down, that includes 78% of Labour voters, 77% of LibDem voters, 73% of the Greens, 44% of Tory supporters and – amazingly – even 25% of those intending to vote for Reform UK.

Over half (55%) of Labour supporters say that Brexit has “not been settled and should be reopened”. As many as 69% believe that there ‘definitely’ or ‘probably’ should be another referendum on Brexit “within the next five years”.

Starmer is just one man, albeit a powerful one at the moment by virtue of his democratic mandate. His opinion carries weight but in a democracy it cannot hold back the clear wishes of the majority. If the people wish to rejoin, they must be able to do so.

This week we added seven downsides:

Food/agriculture

A Peterhead fisher now realises he was sold a “pack of lies” in 2016 and thinks Brexit has been a “total shambles”.

James Stephen, who has spent 44 years at sea, said: “We lost some of our markets because we couldn’t supply them, or the fish was being held up. For one truck, it used to go through with one set of paperwork. There are 42 pallets in a truck. Now, each pallet must have its own paperwork.”

Stephen still thinks Brexit was the “right thing to do” but doesn’t seem to know why.

According to The Times, the UK no longer has any small or medium farms growing new potatoes. Guy Singh-Watson, the founder of one of the country’s biggest vegetable box schemes, said he is finding it impossible to source British early potatoes for his boxes. He called it part of a wider “tragedy” of smaller UK fruit and vegetable growers quitting in the face of low returns, post-Brexit labour shortages and extreme weather.

The Horticultural Trade Association, representing 1,400 garden retailers and growers in the UK, has combined with several European trade bodies to write an open letter calling for urgent solutions for the new post-Brexit border checks, warning the new system was adding more than 25% to import costs.

The economy

Using five different methods, a team of academics at Universities in Bath, Oxford, Bonn and New York have estimated the cost of Brexit to the regions of the UK.

Their figures suggest that England’s economy in 2022 lost between £70-95bn in economic activity owing to Brexit. The Scottish economy was on average £8.5bn to £14bn smaller. The Welsh economy is estimated to be up to £4bn smaller.

The only region not to see an impact was Northern Ireland, which remains largely in the EU single market. No economic costs of Brexit have materialised to date in the province.

Borders

The FT has been told that non-EU goods entering the UK through Dover and supposedly checked using the new border control post at Sevington, Kent, are now entering with weaker checks or none at all. This is according to three customs agents.

Communication issues and delays have beset the post as it struggles to implement the new import control regime. Before Brexit, the UK relied on the bloc to carry out official controls on goods coming into Europe for circulation inside the bloc.

Now, non-EU goods intended for the UK and passing through the EU en-route are not checked until the UK border.

The M20 contraflow scheme known as Operation Brock introduced initially to prevent chaos in Dover as Britain exited the EU, is set to return next week, accompanied by new permits to prevent lorry drivers from bypassing the system.

Many truckers have been skipping the system and taking alternative routes to the Port of Dover, worsening congestion in the area. Kent and Medway Resilience Forum (KMRF) will issue new permits to truckers at the front of the Operation Brock queue between Junctions 8 and 9.

Citizens

The Dutch airline KLM says it is still unsure about Britain’s post-Brexit passport rules, three and a half years after they took effect.

The carrier claims the rules are “very confusing and interpreted differently depending on who we speak to”. It comes after KLM turned away a passenger, Jessica Zielinski, from two Birmingham-Amsterdam flights on the same day in November 2022, even though she had a valid passport.

Zielinski said: “I’m really upset even 18 months later. It felt like a huge waste of finances and expenditure on this trip, and it was devastating missing out on seeing my friends who live abroad.”

Editor’s note: This article originally referenced the alternative vote (AV) referendum in 2011 as being held on a form of PR. Although often misconstrued to be, AV is not a proportional electoral voting system.