Government should ask EU to lengthen Brexit transition period to aid economy

The UK’S ability to extend the period for negotiating a comprehensive future relationship with the EU27 runs out in six weeks.

Barring a breakthrough, this will mean the UK leaving the EU without any trading deal with the world’s biggest economic bloc. The EU supplies 80 per cent of our food imports and no deal further damages an already crippled economy.

If forced back on a US deal on damaging terms, Scotland’s agriculture industry could disappear overnight, our seafood industry perish, our universities go to the wall and the NHS begin to be sliced up into neat pieces for US companies to digest.

This will hit the UK at exactly the same time as we are struggling to recover from Covid-19, which is forecast to potentially lead to a 35 per cent decline in UK economic output.

There is no need for this damaging double whammy. Polling points to the fact that 77 per cent of British people (83 per cent of those in Scotland) want a breathing space. They want the UK to ask for an extension to the transition period – but the UK Government continues to rush towards the cliff edge.

At the very least we deserve this folly to be debated in Parliament.. A public debate is vital, ensuring that the Opposition can challenge this situation, exposing it for what it is and the damage it will inevitably lead to.

MARK LAZAROWICZ Chair, The European Movement

in Scotland Queen Street, Edinburgh

The chances of the UK crashing out of the EU single market and customs union without a trade deal have surged and the UK government has admitted there will be checks on goods crossing the Irish Sea, with a new physical infrastructure at a series of ports – despite Boris Johnson’s promises there would be no such barriers.

Together with the latest Immigration Bill, which will lead to a shortage of fruit and vegetable pickers, this will damage Scotland’s economy at the very time the efforts of the UK government and the European Union should be concentrating on dealing with the dreadful Covid-19 epidemic.

That’s why all the opposition UK party leaders, except one, wrote to Michel Barnier seeking an extension to the timetable for talks. It is disgraceful that Sir Keir Starmer and the Labour Party again sat on the fence and refused to support sensible moves to delay Brexit negotiations until the Covid pandemic subsides.

Starmer’s attitude will allow the Tories to blame Covid for the economic fallout from a no-deal Brexit.

The post Brexit omens are not good, as on 13 May the Scottish Tory MPS helped to defeat an amendment to the UK Agriculture Bill to enshrine in law the principle that imported food would need to match Scottish farmers’ quality and animal welfare standards.

The UK government now has a blank cheque to trade away those high standards out of desperation for a deal, and in so doing undermine safe food production and animal welfare in Scotland.

MARY THOMAS Watson Crescent, Edinburgh