The EU must play fair and allow our exports to flow
AFEW short weeks after Brexit comes unacceptable news – that British supermarket chains in Europe face closure as vindictive border bureaucracy stops our goods reaching them.
If the European Union wants to keep sending its products to us, then it should reciprocate by making access to EU markets equally smooth and efficient. That is the fundamental basis of international trade. and while we are proceeding in good faith, the EU is not.
In December, Boris Johnson pledged there would be “no non-tariff barriers” to our trade with Europe. But every day our exporters are reporting mountains of paperwork and long delays at customs checkpoints in France and elsewhere.
Take Stonemanor supermarket near Brussels, a little oasis of Britishness in Belgium. It has not received any food deliveries from the UK since we left the single market on December 31. With shelves empty, it was forced to shut temporarily last weekend despite having a loyal local clientele.
Morrisons in Gibraltar and Marks & Spencer stores in France have also been badly hit.
MEANWHILE, British fishermen had prepared for Brexit, but have since been deluged with 26 bureaucratic steps to complete and their deliveries held for up to 30 hours at French border controls – threatening the viability of sending their highly perishable goods abroad.
The Road Haulage Association (RHA) has claimed a 68 per cent collapse in trucks taking deliveries to Europe. The Government disputes this but even its own figures, claims the RHA, show a 41 per cent fall in loaded lorries going to France.
This is on top of the shocking farce of Northern Irish stores facing food shortages because of EU barriers to trade across the Irish Sea, ramping up political tension in the province. This too is in direct contradiction to EU claims to be putting peace first in Ireland during the interminable Brexit negotiations.
What is the point of a free trade deal if our exports are being strangled at their border by bureaucracy? With every week of failed or delayed deliveries, British businesses are losing valuable foreign markets.
Of course, from the EU’s point of view this is the price we must pay for daring to vote Leave in 2016.We must be seen to suffer for our defiance to discourage other members from quitting the failing Union.
Its recent debacle in delivering vaccines has heightened tensions within the bloc, raising questions about the EU’s ability to deal with a crisis.
No doubt instructions have gone out to enforce every letter of every single rule, right down to the colour of the ink needed for filling in forms.
Shelves empty of British foodstuffs are a signal to every member state that they must not disobey the EU.
But fear is no way to run an institution. It’s more akin to the Soviet Union and not politically sustainable in the long term.
These are not just “teething problems”, as the Government keeps saying, but a fundamental breach in relations between the UK and the EU.
Worryingly, one wonders why our government negotiators didn’t pick up more forcefully on these bureaucratic barriers embedded in our trade deal? One hopes it wasn’t because of Remainer sympathies among some of our own civil servants.
Michael Gove, the Cabinet Office Minister, is right to warn the EU it must be “practical and pragmatic” over trade between Britain and Northern Ireland or we will be forced to trigger Article 16 to override rules
that wilfully cause friction. “This isn’t some arcane bit of diplomatic procedure,” he says. “This has real consequences on the ground.”
The bigger prize is to ensure peace and prosperity in the UK and EU, but Brussels has always cared more about the politics of keeping its union together than our mutual wellbeing.
It’s also in everyone’s green interests to make sure trade between countries is efficient and not wasteful.
NEEDLESSLY empty trucks should not be tolerated, especially when it’s British companies that are doing their best to save road miles with ingenious ideas, such as Ringtons of Newcastle delivering tea using coastal shipping to UK ports.
In the end the EU will be the ultimate losers as British firms seek fairer, smoother trade with markets elsewhere in the world. Plus, let’s build up the home market for our wonderful seafood with lower prices.
No one wants a trade war, but the EU has fired the first shots and if pushed, we can retaliate by hindering its lucrative flow of goods to our own shores. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.
‘The EU will be the losers as British firms seek fairer trade elsewhere’
OH, those wonderful pictures of the Isle of Man! People gathering together and not a mask in sight!. Yet here people are so terrified that they tell pollsters we should never go back to shaking hands and that we should go on wearing masks even when the pandemic is under control. Speak for yourselves, guys.
LAST week I wrote that the reaction of insurance companies to the compensation culture in this country accounts for much of the excessive bureaucracy which blights Britain. By definition an insurance company is there to insure risk, not eliminate it altogether. A few weeks ago, it was revealed that government plans to designate certain care homes as special centres for receiving Covid patients, to relieve the pressure on hospitals, were thwarted by the refusal of insurers to cover the risk or the inability of providers to meet the increase in premiums.
Then there was a test case in the Supreme Court because so many businesses were being denied payouts under their business interruption policies, where Covid was the cause.
Now we are reading of people unable to afford the soaring insurance costs of flats in buildings where cladding could be a fire risk, despite those homes having been insured for years before the tragedy of Grenfell.
These are, of course, the big, dramatic examples but it is the steady drip, drip of fear of claims for compensation which can make everyday activity such a pain. Often health and safety rules are blamed when the guilty party is the insurance provider.
YET one can understand the caution, when almost every week the papers carry some story about trivial complaints resulting in disproportionate payouts for everything from hurt feelings to tripping over in a playground. Most of us will remember when a council prohibited the backstroke in its swimming pools in case people hit their heads on the side of the pool when coming to the end or the Women’s Institute which was told it could sell buns only if the makers had food handling certificates. Once, when I was taking part in a TV programme, I mildly cut my finger. I asked casually for a plaster to contain the bleeding and was told I must fill out an accident report form. It was necessary, producers insisted, for insurance.
Ye gods! Whatever happened to proportionality?