“I’d vote to stay in the Single Market, I’m in favour of the Single Market”
- Boris Johnson
On 31st December 2020 it will be almost as easy for a manufacturer in Derbyshire to export to a customer in Naples, Italy as it would be for him to supply a customer in Northamptonshire. The following day that will all change. To export to Italy the manufacturer will have to complete 6 customs declaration forms just to get through UK customs at Dover. The lorry driver will need a special permit to enter Kent and will not be able to leave Derbyshire if the lorry queue at Dover is too great. Once in Kent he will risk being diverted to a huge new lorry park in Ashford to have the paperwork checked. If that goes okay, he will then risk being held up by customs officials at Calais whose sole purpose in life is to protect the integrity of the European Union’s Single Market. This will be repeated at ports and airports around the country.
So what, you may say? But the reality of this is that paperwork and delays equals additional costs which inevitably fall on the customer, and our customer in Italy might be tempted to switch to a supplier operating within the Single Market. This process will be repeated thousands of times over per day and will impact hundreds of UK manufacturing companies supplying customers across 27 EU countries.
This clearly is not fertile ground for growing exports into Europe and places UK manufacturers at risk. This is not an academic point as these companies are people’s livelihoods and the Government’s source of tax income. Now if this is put to a Government Minister, he would respond by saying the UK manufacturer is now free to export to anywhere in the world he may choose. This is clearly nonsense because if he wanted to do that, he could already. But breaking into new markets takes time and can be costly. It could turn out to be a long and fruitless exercise just to make up trade lost simply because of the ideology driving the Government’s trade agreement with the EU.
The reality is that the EU trade deal is 1,200+ pages mainly about bureaucracy, paperwork, rules, committees and working groups. Neither side’s intention was to lay the ground for trade growth. The exact opposite, in fact, as the EU’s priority was to protect the integrity of the Single Market and the UK’s priority was to have nothing to do with the institutions governing the Single Market (SM) and the Customs Union (CU). The only result of this can be less trade with our nearest neighbours, not even the same as now, and certainly no growth.
So how did the deal that miraculously appeared out of the woodwork on Christmas Eve stand up against what was promised in the 2016 Referendum. Let’s have a look:
Any deal would secure the same trading benefits as if we remained in the SM and CU: clearly not the case as UK manufacturers will face additional paperwork burdens, checks and border delays and will be denied the preferential treatment available to manufacturers operating within the SM. The Office for Budget Responsibility has predicted that this “limited” deal will leave UK GDP 4% smaller than it would have been by 2035.
Trade Deals with new partners would be ready to sign on day one: they were not and still are not. Given we formally left the EU months ago, the Government is still scrambling to get signed off the deals it already had when it was part of the SM. There are few signs of new deals with new countries which are supposed to make up for the EU trade lost.
There would be more money for public services funded from the so-called “Brexit dividend” from not having to pay money into the EU budget: the extra £350 million per month for the NHS has not materialised and has been quietly forgotten about. Reality is that UK has had to install its own customs and trade negotiations regime the least of which has been the recruitment of 50,000 additional customs officials (few of these have been found so far). There has been the installation of customs infrastructure at ports and airports and the building of 4 huge lorry parks. The truth is the cost of not being in the EU is greater than the cost of being in. There is no Brexit dividend.
The Northern Ireland border will not change: to protect the Good Friday Agreement and to avoid running foul of the soon-to-be President Biden, the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic has been moved into the North Sea with the checks that would have taken place at the border within Ireland now taking place on the British mainland. Northern Ireland, for all intents and purposes, will remain within the Single Market. This is all the more remarkable as not moving the border into the North Sea was one of the many ditches Boris Johnson choose to die in.
The current level of security cooperation will remain: this has turned out to be something of a whopper as the UK no longer wanted access to an EU anti-crime data base consulted by UK police millions of time per year. The UK is no longer a member of Europol, the EU’s policing agency or Eurojust, which is responsible for judicial coordination in criminal cases across member states. This is likely to lead to significant difficulties in organising cross-border investigations. The UK is also no longer party to the European Arrest Warrant, and most detrimentally, the UK will lose access to the Schengen Information System. This is a database of alerts about wanted or missing people and stolen items such as firearms, which British police previously accessed more than 1.65 million times a day. From 1st January the UK will be less safe.
The integrity of the Union would be protected: Boris Johnson has moved the Irish mainland border to the North Sea and Scotland is pressing hard for independence. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that within a few years the island of Ireland will be a united country and Scotland an independent country free to re-joined the EU.
Partnership on science will be strengthened: this is yet another whopper as it has been weakened. The UK has unilaterally left the many partnerships to which it was a party.
Immigration drastically reduced: another whopper as the numbers have either stayed roughly the same or increased slightly in each year since 2016. Reality is that immigration from the EU has fallen away and been replaced by immigrants from other parts of the world. Immigration is primarily driven by the needs of the UK economy and not by lazy Europeans coming here to sponge off the NHS and pinch council houses. We now have the nonsense of NHS recruitment teams having to travel to the Philippines to find nurses where once they could more easily, and cheaply, secured staff from EU countries. We no longer have access to EU labour to pick UK grown fruit and vegetable and to staff care homes. Those who voted to leave because they do not like immigrants are likely to be mightily disappointed.
It is difficult to find any of the grand “we can have our cake and eat it” promises made in 2016 having been delivered. The failure to deliver in any meaningful way on those promises is not the end of the duplicity.
In the House of Commons on 15th January 2020 Boris Johnson said, “There is no threat to the Erasmus Scheme, and we will continue to participate in it”. It turned out there was, and we are not. British students, particularly the under privileged, have now lost the opportunity to study in Europe and links between UK and EU educational institutions have been damaged.
Brits travelling to Europe will no longer have access to the priority immigration channels at points of entry. UK citizens will have to queue up for a detailed passport check with the kind of immigrants they want to keep out of the UK. The admitting country has the right to see a return travel ticket and that you have enough funds to sustain you through the visit. At present, as EU citizens, people in the UK have a legal right of entry into other EU countries which can only revoked in exceptional circumstances. From 1st January that goes, and each individual is at the whim of the admitting country. In any case visits are restricted to 3 months duration (90 days in any 180-day period). Visits beyond 90 days will require visas.
If you want to take your pet pooch on holiday with you, pet passports also go on 1st January. Travelling with Fido will become bureaucratic and expensive as certificates and vet checks will be necessary each and every time Fido travels.
The legal right as an EU citizen to work, study, retire or live in another EU country becomes history on 1st January.
The continuation of freedom from mobile phone roaming charges will in future be at the whim of the telecom providers for UK citizens. Sadly for us, it was the EU that negotiated the removal of roaming charges for EU citizens.
Free access to local healthcare provision across the EU on the same level as locals also becomes history on 1st January. This will surely raise travel insurance premiums.
UK passports must have at least 6 months of unexpired time on them or travelling Brits could be denied entry.
The trade deal is like a moth-attacked blanket – full of holes. It is indeed thin gruel.
The prospect of frictionless trade (another 2016 promise) was quickly flushed away. It does not cover the service sector which accounts for 80% of the UK economy. That means that bankers, financers, insurers, graphic designers, lawyers, accountants etc are now at the mercy of whatever individual EU countries decide to do and have no rights as EU citizens to trade or work in Europe. We can expect the process of movement by banks of money and services away from London to Frankfurt and Paris etc to continue. Companies moving their HQs to Amsterdam and other major capitals will also continue as the reality of trading as a “third country” sinks in.
Cultural links will be undermined as moving people and goods around Europe becomes more problematic. Leaving the EU will undermine the successful British entertainment industry.
I doubt any of this litany of bad news will rock the faith of Brexit’s true believers. For them, the only objective was leaving the EU lock, stock and barrel. For them, all the grievances they have been nursing were the fault of the EU and Johnny Foreigner’s interference in our affairs. For them they see freedom and the opportunity to shape a new destiny without any idea what that destiny should look like.
The millions who like me did not vote for Brexit see the UK now as a much-diminished country - shabby and inward looking, petty and fearful of the outside world, isolated, trying to build a future based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the past. No, it is not likely the “white” Commonwealth will form a trade pact with us so we can create the supposed might of a long-lost Empire. I just wonder if many Brexiteers have visited Canada recently? They might love the Royal Family, but see the UK on a scale between irrelevance and yesterday’s man.
If Boris Johnson has a fantasy about being the leader of a free trade movement across the globe, striking deals between and with individual countries, I have bad news for him as globalisation is back!
The African Free Trade Area, covering 1.3 billion people takes effect from 1st January. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, representing nearly a third of the world’s population and featuring China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar and Brunei was agreed last November. China has also expressed an interest in joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Sadly, we have listened too carefully to Trump and his anti-free trade area stance and have left the world’s biggest and most successful free trade grouping. We may have to watch Johnson bounce around the world trying to penetrate all those free trade zones. Good luck with that one. The whole purpose of a free trade area is to make trading between neighbours as easy and seamless as possible to the mutual benefit of the member countries. A concept Boris Johnson seems not to understand.
I just wonder if Boris Johnson has not made a fundamental error in assuming Trump would win a second term and be a friend (as far as Trump could ever be) to the UK by negotiating a huge trade deal. The prospect of that has much receded and to Johnson’s embarrassment, the early indications are that although Joe Biden would indeed like a trade deal he sees it being negotiated in parallel with the EU. It could be the ultimate shame face for Johnson having to sit in the same room as the EU negotiating team in order to get any deal with the US on its coat tails. The bottom line is there is a greater market for Jim Bean whiskey, Hershey chocolate and Jeeps in the EU than there is in the UK.
No doubt Johnson will play the world leader claiming it is our independence from the EU that has allowed him to play the role. The reality is that our “soft” influence will have been diminished as result of not being in the room when decisions are made about the world’s biggest and most successful free trade area.
This withdrawal from Europe could risk our place on the UN Security Council. The UK is already slipping down the league table of biggest economies. We are no longer the US’s entry point to Europe. I doubt Joe Biden will ever visit here but instead head off to Paris and Berlin as he repairs Trump’s damage to NATO and rebuilds the alliance against Russian malevolence.
Our future on the world stage could be limited to issuing press releases.
Boris Johnson has signed off on the world’s first trade reduction agreement. He has separated the biggest parts of our economy from their markets and made the UK a less safer and influential country but least we can all come together and rejoice at the prospect of a free trade deal with Federated States of Micronesia.
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