We’ve made our bed and must lie on it

THE WDP raises a number of issues that might be talked through on the subject of the Brexit effects in all its various ways. But as an ardent remainer or, as some liked to say pre-leaving date, ‘a remoaner’, can I be a reminder for a moment.

We have left the EU. We are out... free as a cageless parrot. No need for debate on what the EU decide to do about an army. Britain is a member of NATO and has been since 1948 and it is a European mutual defence agreement that includes the US and, I believe, Canada and every state in the EU. The advent of an EU army will not cast a shadow over his garage. It will only exist if all the states of the EU agree to it. I doubt we shall see an EU army of French, Dutch, Czech, and Greek soldiers invading us.

What we need is an EU HGV drivers’ army.

The dreadful freedom of movement across state boundaries for EU citizens does not apply to us in the UK, any more than it does to the people of North Korea, Uruguay or Timbuktu.

The British Government now controls who can, or cannot, enter the UK – except when British industry and commerce starts to shout about the urgent need for

HGV drivers, or nurses, or fruit and veg pickers, or hospital workers, and meat packers and butchers and carpenters and bricklayers and skilled technical experts. Oh yes, and doctors who appear to have left the planet.

That’s when the Government hands immigration controls over to business needs and away from political gurus. I understand at least a bus full of HGV drivers have applied for the temporary visas.

What I do know is already happening is that small businesses across Europe and in the UK are throwing the paperwork that is a concomitant part of post Brexit trade in the dustbin.

Friends in Spain, France and Germany tell me that Britishmade products they used to buy have disappeared from the shelves, and similarly I know have disappeared from the UK shops and supermarkets. For the modest contribution it made to trade and profit, it’s just not worth it.

Why bother or get angry about what the EU does? There is a mechanism for solving disputes if one side or the other fails to fully comply to the EU – the UK Brexit leave agreement.

You rightly report about a French threat about EU power supplies to Britain, if Britain does not fully conform to the terms of the trade agreement the British Government sign up to. I am sure some would agree Britain must fully meet the terms of agreement it took three years to negotiate and put its name to.

There is the same problem with the Single Market that Britain now wants to partially join – for Britain’s own benefit, not the EU’s. Why should they bother to even answer the phone?

Britain now paddles its own canoe; in EU language we are a third country and that is what we voted to be in 2016. Whether that meets our material supply needs in terms or workers or food, HGV drivers, nurses, or toy balloons is in the hands of the geniuses in Downing street.

Whether we plough over fields of daffodils, kill and bonfire 160,000 pigs, bury cauliflowers... that may or may not be the fault of a the agreement to leave the EU, which we signed up to. It’s too late now. We are on our own.

Now we must make our own bed and lie on it.

Don Frampton Newton Abbot