Daily Archives: October 3, 2021

Brexit is the name given to the United Kingdoms departure from the European Union. It is a combination of Britain and exit.

On 23 June 2016, the UK held a referendum on its membership of the EU. The question facing voters was: Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union? 51.89% of voters voted to leave the EU. The UK left the EU on 31 January 2020.

Up to and including 31 December 2020 a transition period was in place. During that time nothing changed and the UK continued to comply with all EU laws and rules. Negotiations were also held on the new relationship between the UK and the EU during this time.

On 24 December 2020 negotiators for the EU and the UK reached a deal on the two parties new relationship.The EU and the UK have set out the terms of this deal in three agreements:

On 1 January 2021 the rules set out in these agreements will come into force. You can find out what this means for you on this website.

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What is Brexit? | Government.nl

The UK government promised that Brexit would liberate Britain from European trading regulations and herald a bright new era for Britain on the world stage.

Yet after spending years campaigning for the UK's exit from the European Union, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his colleagues have been oddly quiet about Britain's fortunes ever since it left.

The reason for their silence is becoming increasingly obvious. Since Britain left European trade and customs rules at the start of this year, there has been a dramatic decline in UK trade.

According to the UK's Office for National Statistics, trade between the EU and the UK was hit hard in January, with exports down by 40.7% compared with December and imports from the EU down by 28% in the same period.

This is the biggest overall fall in exports since records began, yet the decline for some sectors has been even worse.

Analysis by the Food & Drink Federation published last week showed that exports in January dropped to 7 million or about $9.6 million from 45 million year-on-year, while whisky exports dropped to 40 million from 105 million.

This is a colossal decline. For some sectors, including parts of the UK's world-renowned shellfish fishing industry, the decline could be permanent because of the EU's effectively locking Britain out of its market altogether.

For some smaller businesses, the piles of paperwork, bureaucracy, and export health-certificate checks that are now required to trade with Britain's closest trading partners now make it very difficult to export anything at all.

"What I'm hearing a lot is that a lot of small businesses have been shut out completely," Dominic Goudie, the head of international trade at the Food & Drink Federation, told Insider.

Brexit is not the only reason that trade with the EU nosedived in January: Part of the drop-off was the result of pre-Brexit stockpiling and the COVID-19 pandemic, which has shuttered businesses across the continent, said Goudie, and a British government official told Reuters that trade in February had partially rebounded, though official figures are yet to be published.

Many leading business figures, however, believe that Brexit's impact will be permanent, with Adam Marshall, the outgoing director-general of the British Chambers of Commerce, telling Bloomberg last week that the impact appeared to be serious and "structural."

For an island nation heavily reliant on imports, even small delays to trade can have a big impact.

"If you have a problem with one single item in that entire lorry, it delays everything else," Goudie told Insider.

"That's the stuff that really worries me," Goudie said. "Larger businesses are adapting the volume should start to pick up.

"But the smaller businesses, in particular, are going to be badly hit. That's what really concerns me in all of this."

Sales of many lower-value items have, in many cases, simply become unviable. Simon Spurrell, a cofounder of the Cheshire Cheese Company, stopped exporting his packs of cheeses, which were priced at about 30 each, to the EU because each parcel needed to be accompanied by a 180 health certificate, he told The Guardian.

He said he had been advised by a minister to simply focus on exporting to other markets instead.

All of this is a long way from the bright new trading future promised by Johnson and the UK government.

And while the political debate in Britain has been dominated by the coronavirus pandemic in recent months, the longer-term impact of the UK cutting its ties with its closest trading partners could soon become a massive political issue once again.

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Brexit Is a Disaster for UK, European Trade Collapses ...

Since the 2019 general election, there has been a mutually convenient conspiracy of silence between Britains two main parties about Brexit. Boris Johnson won the election on the soundbite promise to get Brexit done, and then behaved as though all aspects of the UKs departure from Europe were now fully sorted. The Labour party, meanwhile, licked its wounds, tacitly accepted that Brexit was indeed settled, and decided not to mention the subject if it could be avoided.

The Covid emergency then provided understandable cover for both positions. Now, however, as Covid perhaps recedes and something akin to normal politics resumes, silence has become impossible to maintain. Many aspects of Brexit are neither done nor dusted. Some are contributing to increasingly serious national problems. These include issues of trade, movement, education and, above all, the status of Northern Ireland. It is high time that these again became part of national political debate, not least because mishandling them could have a dire effect on Britains ability to deliver an adequate climate crisis deal in Glasgow in November.

Mr Johnson does not talk about Brexits practicalities today, any more than he ever did during the referendum campaign. When he mentions Brexit at all, it is to taunt Labour with being bad losers. He acts, probably with focus-group backing, as if Conservative voters continue to see Brexit as a great emotional issue of reclaimed sovereignty, not a set of still-evolving practical relationships for which government must take responsibility. These relationships need to be settled in ways that are consistent with the 2016 vote while avoiding unnecessary economic, constitutional and international damage. However, Mr Johnson and his minister David Frost still prefer the politics of confrontation to the politics of rational compromise, even over the vexed issues of Northern Ireland.

Sir Keir Starmer seemed content to go along with all this during the first 18 months of his leadership. He knows that there is no point refighting a battle he would lose, or reopening wounds that have barely healed. This autumn, however, something is changing. The trigger has been the large-scale disruption of supply chains in fuel, pharmaceuticals and food caused by the shortage of HGV drivers. This threatens not just panic at the pumps and empty shelves in the shops, but also a crisis at Christmas. All are, in part, the consequence of the sloppy handling of Brexit. Blame for that can be widely shared. But Sir Keir would be failing in his task if he did not take the fight to the government over its lack of planning for these crises. He needs to talk turkey.

In his conference speech, Sir Keir decided to reopen the previously well-padlocked Brexit box a little. He attacked Mr Johnson for a Brexit policy that amounted to little more than a slogan. He identified sorting out Britains relationship with Europe as one of the key issues of the day, along with the climate crisis, Covid recovery, economic regeneration and stopping the break-up of Britain. And he came up with a phrase of his own the need for a plan to make Brexit work. These words may mean something or nothing. But they are a good sign, as far as they go. Now it is the Tories turn to get serious. The issues of implementation are real and pressing. They require policy planning, not partisan posturing from Britains leaders.

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The Guardian view on silence about Brexit: time to talk turkey - The Guardian

Driving across France last Thursday was like driving in Britain used to be no worries about petrol and no queues. Returning to London was a brutal tipping into another reality. One of the first duties of a government is to ensure that citizens can go about their daily business without hassle and anxiety. With abundant petrol in the refineries there was never need for this pain we are living through an abject failure of governance.

Brexit is plainly one of the reasons for the shortage of drivers and for the troublesome frictions at our borders spilling over into problems in the food and supermarket supply chains. More crucially, it was ministers very fear that early action would be seen as proof positive of Brexits frailties that so paralysed them.

Thus road haulage chiefs met junior transport minister Baroness Vere on 16 June to urge temporary visas for overseas drivers, a campaign to attract retired drivers back to work and one to address the driving test backlog. But transport ministers dont trust the Remoaner road haulage lobby, loud in its early criticism last winter of how hard Brexits new border controls has made it to move goods in and out of Britain. On top, every minister recalls the ruthless withdrawal of the Tory whip from 21 colleagues in September 2019. To have any pro-EU sympathies is a mark of Cain.

Vere knew that, as a former executive director of the Conservatives In campaign, she is viewed with suspicion and No 10 wanted the line held. The industry should pay better and recruit and train more British drivers. Part of the point of Brexit was to shift from a low-wage, low-skill economy dependent on EU migrants. She closed the June meeting by telling executives the government did not want to create panic, leaving unsaid that any panic six months after Brexit would be politically toxic.

Over the summer, the line held even as problems mounted. On the evening of 23 September, just as news that BP was closing some petrol stations because of tanker driver shortages, the home secretary, Priti Patel, was celebrating with 25 other self-styled Spartans the Tory MPs who voted three times against Theresa Mays compromise Brexit deals at the Carlton Club. They congratulated themselves on the hardest of hard Brexits they had achieved, along with Patels visa policy excluding low-paid immigrants. Boris Johnson, urged to create at least 20,000 visas to bring in foreign drivers to have a chance of tackling the crisis, knows how strongly his political base supports Patels stance on immigration. He did the least possible, announcing 10,500 temporary three-month visas for tanker drivers and poultry workers, keenly aware of the impending turkey shortage about to blight Christmas.

It was the equivalent of throwing a thimble of water on a bonfire, as Baroness McGregor-Smith, president of the British Chambers of Commerce, memorably said. Now, belatedly, comes the news that 100 army tanker drivers begin on Monday, to be joined by 300 overseas drivers fast-tracked in on a visa especially extended to February. Vere has finally written to a million holders of HGV licences urging them to return to the industry. The thimble of water has grown into a bottle, but the bonfire shows every sign of burning out only slowly and already at the cost of a collapse in business confidence. Panic buying and lost trust are hard to reverse.

Of course the government should have acted far more decisively, far sooner and provided the public with accurate information. Accuracy and honesty are the best ways of calming fears. But there is remarkably little outcry about its dithering and its bluster: a YouGov poll reports that only 23% of the population blame it and nearly half blame the media.

One reason is that Labour cannot lay into the Brexit-induced dither as authentically and strongly as it could and should; it backed the treaty and judges that the public is not yet ready to hear advocacy for the EU. Despite everything, most Leavers continue to back Brexit. They might feel they voted for a higher-wage, higher-skill economy propelled by lower immigration and that, however bumpily, its now in train. Advertised pay rates for HGV drivers have risen 12.8% this year alone, while working-class Leave voters might like the spectacle of Tory ministers urging employers to pay and train people better.

And yet HGV drivers are only one sector. Immigration was always more a manpower than a wages game. For example, the Bank of England found that all EU immigration between 2004 and 2011 reduced semi- and low-skilled service sector wages by less than 1% a year. Any impact was on the lowest 10% of wage earners and then only slight. But what immigration did was to expand the economy: an economys annual output represents the number of average hours worked multiplied by the output per person hour, multiplied by the working population. Immigrants dont change investment or productivity, but they increase the numbers able to pick fruit, kill pigs, rear turkeys and drive lorries.

Without immigrants, the economy grows less quickly or shrinks. A quarter of all UK firms, including half of all transport businesses, say they cant fill vacancies because EU applicants no longer apply. Their scope to pay higher wages is capped by how much they can sell on profitable margins; if they cant employ people at an affordable wage, then supermarket shelves arent stocked and tanks in petrol stations arent replenished.

Without free movement of EU workers or a liberal visa policy, Britain has an intertwined manpower, mobility and skills crisis: there are not enough people in the right places with the right skills to sustain the output we are used to. The mismatch will eventually be solved, the solution delayed by our chronically weak training system and housing shortage; the economy will be smaller, people will gradually acquire the necessary skills, but the dislocation will involve shortages, queues, even rationing and very low growth.

Meanwhile, surveys show a growing majority in favour of immigration. The open question in British politics is whether Brexit can even half work before the public gives up on it. The governments actions betray its anxiety over the answer. My guess, after this week, is that the moment when the public begins to stop believing is approaching and faster than anyone thinks.

Will Hutton is an Observer columnist

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Panic at the pumps could herald a brave new Brexit order. I have my doubts - The Guardian

In 1979 the Conservative party under Margaret Thatcher fought a successful election campaign with the slogan Labour isnt working. The campaign relied on a profusion of posters purporting to show a long line of unemployed people. It later turned out that this was not a real dole queue but a group of actors hired for the purpose.

This was characteristic of the loose attitude to the facts what President Obama memorably dubbed truth decay that has become more prevalent in recent years.

It is increasingly apparent that Brexit isnt working. But this has not prevented the worst crop of cabinet ministers in living memory from denying that the present supply chain shortages and autumn of discontent have anything to do with Brexit.

When it is pointed out by our fellow Europeans no longer, alas, fellow members of the EU that the petrol and supply chain crisis has everything to do with Brexit, ministers find themselves reluctantly having to concede that it may have been a factor.

In my last column I made mention of a number of metropolitan elite figures who bear considerable responsibility for the meretricious Brexit campaign: the focus was in particular on the three leading culprits, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings. But thanks to a recent report in the Daily Telegraph that shameless Brexit bastion we now learn that, even when Brexiters like Simon Wolfson, chief executive of Next, are screaming for a relaxation of the clampdown on migrants, a group of Conservative MPs, led by one Sir William Cash, have been celebrating their part in this countrys downfall.

These MPs blithely claim that we would still be effectively in the EU if they had not crucially voted down Theresa Mays compromise proposals on three occasions in 2019. They had a celebration of their dubious achievement in that Conservative holy of holies, the Carlton Club. Cash evidently had the temerity to claim that it was the most important vote since the Norway vote in 1940 the one that brought down Neville Chamberlain and prepared the way for Churchill as wartime prime minister.

This is a weird comparison, possibly qualifying for what my philosopher friends would call a category error. Moreover, as CEM Joad used to say on the old BBC Brains Trust, it all depends what you mean by, in this case, the term most important. Most important in bringing freedom from Brussels, as Cash and co would have it? Or most important in limiting the freedom of British citizens in all manner of ways, via a proliferation of bureaucratic controls, and the chaos caused by effectively sending crucial participants in the economy back to mainland Europe? Care homes, supermarkets, petrol stations and ordinary people all are now feeling the effects.

The last post-hoc rationalisation from those members of the Brexit gang who have not, like Lord Wolfson, recognised the error of their ways is that this is the opportunity for British workers to fill the gap, in a major economic structural change. But the world does not work in the way the more naive free marketers would have it: the point is that the British workers with the right skills are simply not there. The HGV problems have been well aired, and are not going away in a hurry. It took a good five years for the Attlee government to restructure the economy after 1945.

Less well aired than the HGV crisis may be a letter to the Financial Times last week in which leading members of the hospitality industry meant to be a pride and joy of the service sector of the British economy urgently ask the government to revise current settlement and pre-settlement schemes and the highly skilled migrants lists. In other words, a Brexit based on prejudice against workers from continental Europe is a disaster.

Which brings us to the Labour partys hitherto pusillanimous approach to Brexit. At last there are signs of stirrings in the ranks, with Hilary Benn and others speaking out. But when Sir Keir Starmer says we need a plan to make Brexit work I fear he is not going nearly far enough. Yes, we need, in his words, to sort out our future relationship with Europe, but I find it difficult to reconcile this intention with his dismissal of a return to the essence of the single market painstakingly negotiated by Thatcher, namely free movement.

It is the abandonment of free movement to please the likes of the ineffable Cash that has made us the laughing stock of the world. Oh, and by the way, now that he has made such a major contribution to this nations self-inflicted damage, I wonder what Farages future plans are. In March 2017 he was quoted as saying: If Brexit is a disaster, I will go and live abroad.

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Brexit isnt working but Tories of the Carlton Club cant admit it - The Guardian