Gove: Goods will flow after Brexit
THERE should be no significant delay to the flow of goods through ports after Brexit if “we all do the right thing”, Michael Gove has said.
The Cabinet minister in charge of nodeal planning visited Holyhead Port in North Wales to meet with organisations working on the trade route to Northern Ireland, Ireland and the rest of the world.
Mr Gove said that predictions of a threemonth “meltdown” at ports in the event of a no-deal Brexit, as revealed in the leaked Operation Yellowhammer documents, were “the absolute worst case”.
He said: “I’m confident that, if we all do the right thing, on October 31 we will be able to ensure that goods can flow in and out of ports like Holyhead without any significant delay.
“There are a number of scenarios, there is a worst case and we are trying very hard to reduce the risk of that worst case materialising.
“I think the steps that we’ve taken over the course of the last three weeks and more steps that we’ll be taking in the next few weeks and months will ensure that we reduce the risk even further. One of them is making sure that traders have all the information and the systems that they need in order to be able to export.”
Mr Gove was given a tour of the country’s second busiest port, which was being used by both freight vehicles and holiday-makers on their way to Dublin, and met with representatives who run organisations from there.
Meanwhile, German chancellor Angela Merkel has told prime minister Boris Johnson he has 30 days to come up with an alternative solution to replace the Irish backstop.
Mr Johnson called her timetable “blistering”, but said he was “more than happy” with her proposal to speed-up the talks.
The Conservative Party leader arrived in Berlin yesterday to kick-start talks to find an alternative to the Irish backstop – a contingency measure negotiated by his predecessor Theresa May to get an exit deal over the line.
The backstop was a stop-gap measure agreed by Mrs May in an attempt to prevent a hard border being reinstalled in Northern Ireland, a move that would have tied the UK to European Union rules until a solution was found.
Mrs Merkel, in a statement in the Chancellery, said the backstop had always been a “fallback position” and would only come into effect if no other solution could be agreed that would protect the “integrity of the single market”.
In an attempt to have a backstop solution in place before the October 31 Brexit deadline, the German leader said she wanted a new arrangement agreed within 30 days.
She said: “If one is able to solve this conundrum, if one finds this solution, we said we would probably find it in the next two years to come but we can also maybe find it in the next 30 days to come.”