List of self-inflicted harm goes on and on

WHY are we so tolerant? Is it still the stiff upper lip that means we don’t complain? Or is it that we are just lazy and can’t be bothered to demand that our leaders do better?

Do we only get angry about politics when it hits us personally? “I’m all right Jack,” provided we don’t look beyond today?

Mr Farage insisted that Brexit would give us control of our borders but 24,500 people have arrived by small boat across the Channel in 2021. When we were in the EU, we could use the Dublin Agreement to send back several hundred migrants each year. We now have no agreement with any nation to return any migrants. The Minister responsible for migration says that this year we have repatriated five migrants.

In the EU, we benefited from EU migrants as lorry drivers, and care, agricultural and construction workers. Because we have discarded most of these people, we have one million job vacancies; who will take up the slack?

The boss of the Headland Hotel in Newquay states that half of her staff used to be EU people; now because they’ve gone she has had to close 20 of her 90 bedrooms.

Smaller hotels will also close, so fewer rich tourists spending money in Cornwall. And a positive: wages have gone up in hospitality because of worker shortages, but people are leaving the care sector to transfer across so our older relatives in homes are getting significantly less care because of Brexit.

Higher wages also means restaurant prices are going up: ‘Eat out to Pay Up’.

Meanwhile, as reported in this newspaper on November 9, Cornwall has lost the £100,000,000 per annum that it used to get from the EU. Cornwall Council says that, despite Rishi Sunak’s promise that he “would match” EU funds, the county is due to receive £1,000,000 this year from our Government! What did someone say recently about ‘Levelling Up’ and promises? “Blah, blah, blah...”

And Morrisons has just been sold to an American private equity firm; significant profit for these Yanks because the pound has lost its value because of Brexit. Companies like this purchaser often sell off the best bits of what they have snapped up, so the 120,000 workers at Morrisons might need “to get on their bikes”, as one famous Tory said. Morrisons had its own farms, so the important concept of ‘farm to fork’ might well be a victim in this case.

And one of our ‘best’ new trade agreements (with Australia adding 0.02% to our GDP) will, says the NFU, have a big negative effect on our beef farmers over the next ten years... the list of self-inflicted harms goes on and on.

Mr Farage, the architect of much of this, offers us advice on how to make private profit and puts out a video on how he catches tuna off Cornwall. Is that what Brexit was all about? And Mr Johnson, who ‘got it done’, loses his place in a speech to the CBI for 20 to 30 seconds; then he recommends that our industry leaders should visit the Peppa Pig Theme Park in Hampshire.

Why do we tolerate such ‘leadership’?

Jeremy Hall Exeter