Brexit really is a ‘gift’ that keeps on giving

BREXIT is like a slow-release capsule: it is the gift that keeps on giving.

We are now seeing some of the advantages of leaving the EU: black British passports that we can show when we cross EU borders, pint bottles of wine, the removal of the cap on bankers’ bonusses, and freedom from EU regulations that prevented sewage from being dumped in rivers and on beaches.

The LSE Centre for Economic Performance reported that, after its first two years (by the end of 2021), Brexit had added £6billion to UK food bills through border delays and red tape (an increase in food prices of three percent).

At the end of this month, in line with the Brexit agreement, we will see the imposition of charges on food and plant consignments from EU countries into the UK. This will add an additional cost to the existing disincentive of all the red-tape EU exporters to the UK already have to face.

Many EU producers are deciding that importing into the UK is not worth the effort, given the frictionless trade available with 20-plus countries in the EU.

This brings us a step closer to Lyn Truss’s dream of supermarket shelves freed from foreign produce – with cheddar cheese as the only option.

The EU allowed the UK a period of grace before the imposition of these charges. In 2022, in the context of this delay, Rees Mogg said that enforcing the post-Brexit checks on imports “would have been an act of selfharm”.

As a result, however, British farmers were left at a disadvantage, since they had to pay the price of costly checks when exporting across the Channel, while French, Spanish and Italian farmers had no such checks exporting into the UK.

The new regime, which will put imports on an equal footing with exports, brings another problem. The imposition of the scheme has been deferred five times because Britain doesn’t have enough vets to check imported foodstuffs: many of the UK vets came from Spain and Romania, and they returned home in the postBrexit ‘hostile environment’.

We will be faced with two equally unpalatable alternatives: proper checks which will cause delays (and rotting foodstuffs) or ‘light touch’ checks which will bring the risk of importing swine fever and foot and mouth disease.