We are about to be shut outside the EU fortress
Idon’t normally respond to hostile points made about this column on our letters page. But one example last week repeated a fundamental misconception so widely shared – not least by our politicians – that it merits an answer. “Booker must stop saying,” its author sternly enjoined, “that when we leave the EU we may not have access to its market. Everyone can sell or buy into Europe at any time… the market is open to all and always will be. Markets are not made by governments, they are made by buyers and sellers.”
This view is so comprehensively wrong on every count that I will this week focus on just one further important example, so far not mentioned, of what we are risking with Theresa May’s decision that, on leaving the EU, we should leave not only its single market but also the wider European Economic Area (EEA), which would allow us to continue and procedures, all of which must be followed.
If we choose to leave that fortress, we will find its drawbridge has been raised against us, making it very much more complicated to enter. A particular example is what will happen to all those thousands of British businesses that share in our £9 billion-a-year food exports to the EU. Once we leave, Britain becomes what it calls a “third country”; and all our animal-related products, deemed because of potential diseases to be “high risk”, will then have to face the new set of rules that apply to any other “third country”.
Apart from many other requirements, such as the need for Britain to be officially recognised as an “approved country”, and for every food-related business to be subject to new EU inspections, the live animals, dairy products, eggs, fish and processed foods now carried smoothly to the Continent in trucks through Calais will have to be diverted to a ‘A new inspection point will have to be built, at a cost of tens of millions of euros, probably to Britain’ “Border Inspection Point” (BIP), for a mass of new checks and inspections that could take days. An additional problem is that the nearest BIP at Dunkirk is so small that a much larger one will have to be built, with facilities for hundreds of new officials and a vast waiting area for those queuing for inspection; all at a cost of tens of millions of euros, which the French would understandably expect Britain to pay. For all those Welsh farmers who depend on selling lambs to the EU – where we currently export 385,000 sheep and 34,000 live cattle a year – or those cheesemakers and other businesses that export perishable goods requiring refrigeration, this will pose immense practical problems; as will also be faced on the border between the north and south of Ireland, where some foods involved in processing can end up criss-crossing the border five times before they are ready to be sold.
Politicians may wave all this aside as just something else to be “sorted out in the negotiations”. But the rules are the rules. They have no more idea of how tricky it may be to resolve this problem than they have so far shown any sign of recognising that it exists at all.
At the moment the movement of all this trade into the EU is, as Mrs May describes it, “frictionless”. But if we leave the fortress on the terms she seems to be proposing, she has no idea how far this may involve not just the lifting of its drawbridge, but the raising of a mighty portcullis as well.
Of course, if she had the sense to keep us in the EEA, none of these problems would arise. But, by relying on her “Brexiteer” advisers, she may be facing rather stonier faces across that negotiating table than she has yet begun to imagine.