BREXIT: THE DAY AFTER
A journey into the all-too-near future depicts the disruptions that could shake the United Kingdom
As the clock strikes zero, the prime minister isn’t in his office. Instead, he’s at 70 Whitehall, ensconced in a Cabinet Office briefing room. Operation Yellowhammer is in full swing. What will happen in the next 24 hours? |
This account of the first 24 hours of a no-deal Brexit is based on interviews, government documents, and academic research. The people described are real, as are their views on Brexit. Brexit might not play out this way. Prime Minister Boris Johnson could reach a deal with the European Union. Parliament’s attempts to block a no-deal departure could succeed or delay the inevitable. Johnson could be booted from office. We won’t know until we know.
11pm, October 31, Westminster, London
The digital Brexit countdown clock in Johnson’s office at No. 10 Downing St. reads 00 Days, 00:00:00 in red digits. The UK has left the European Union.
As the clock strikes zero, the prime minister isn’t in his office. Instead, he’s at 70 Whitehall, ensconced in a Cabinet Office briefing room (or Cobra), the British government’s nerve Centre during emergencies. Operation Yellowhammer, the code name for the no-deal Brexit contingency plan, is in full swing.
A deal would’ve given the UK a grace period to prepare for life outside the EU. Instead, the immediate rupture has left the country alone on the world stage for the first time since the early 1970s. The pound is in a dive. On the bank of screens at one end of the room, a helicopter shot shows anti-Brexit protesters swarming Westminster. Counterprotesters brandish Union Jacks. So far, there’s been no significant violence.
11:30pm, just outside Folkestone, Kent
A dark blue Mercedes van hurtles down the motorway toward the white cliffs of Dover. The 007 theme blares from a Samsung Galaxy S7. Roger Moore — the 65-year-old driver for courier company JJX Logistics, not the deceased actor known for his licence to kill — answers. On the line is his boss, John, calling from the head office in Dudley. “How’s it going, Rog?”
“All good, John, no trouble at all. Traffic’s completely clear.” The roads are quieter than usual, and he’s making good time. In the back of the van are wooden crates packed with Airbus plane parts that need to be in Paris by early tomorrow. After he’s crossed the channel, Moore will become one of the first Britons in four decades to enter the Continent as a nonEU citizen. About time, too, he thinks: He was among the 17.4 million who voted Leave.
At the Eurotunnel complex, he joins his co-worker Chris and waits to drive onto the train that will carry them through the 50km-long Channel Tunnel. Next to the departures monitor, a TV shows a live BBC News Brexit special. “This is gonna make us poorer, this,” Chris says. He voted Remain.
7:30am, November 1, Newry, Counties Armagh and Down, Northern Ireland
In the 3 minutes it takes 73-year-old Jazz McDonnell to drive back to his sheep farm after his constitutional through the foggy hills, he leaves the EU, enters it, and leaves again. The Irish border is a crooked squiggle, and his land straddles it: 270 acres of lush, hilly farmland in the UK ’s Northern Ireland, 500 in the EU’s Republic of Ireland. Once home, Jazz — christened James — eats some hot porridge before setting out to move some rams. It’s mating season.
The McDonnell family has raised sheep here for centuries. But overnight, the animals now face an export tariff to the EU of almost 50 per cent. At the pre-Brexit price of £80 (Dh361) per head, McDonnell just about broke even. After costs — feed, diesel, rent — he made a profit of £1 a head. With sheep prices about to plummet, and without the EU subsidies that made up about half his income, he’ll go out of business. “Come on, Toby!” McDonnell calls, calling his collie into his van.
8am, London
In an office just a few steps from the Monument to the Great Fire of 1666, Mark Hemsley hears the ring of an oldfashioned bell and looks at a wall of screens overhead. Financial markets have opened in Amsterdam and London. He wants this moment to be as boring as possible.
Hemsley is president of the European division of Cboe Global Markets. Matching buyers and sellers from across the globe in split-second transactions worth billions of euros each day is a part of the plumbing of Britain’s financial sector, 7 per cent of the nation’s economic output.
This year, EU regulators looked like they were going to demand that European shares be traded inside the bloc after
For Johnson, his Churchill moment has come. He gives nightly speeches from No. 10, urging calm. Brexit will be worth it in the long run, he says. “Britain is taking back control,” he says.
Brexit, so Cboe set up a hub in Amsterdam. A dozen of Hemsley’s staff are now there, poised to liaise with customers, watch markets, and satisfy regulators.
Cboe’s readiness for no-deal is matched across the City. Big banks such as HSBC, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan Chase triggered Brexit plans long ago, sending bankers to Paris and Frankfurt and setting up EU subsidiaries to ensure continuity. Still, there are some headaches. Listing European shares for trading on both the Dutch and UK boards — having two platforms and a split trading volume — may mean less competition, fewer trades, and higher prices.
9:30am, near Stafford, West Midlands
The smell of melting acrylic fills the factory floor at Goodfish Ltd. Machines whirr noisily, pumping hot plastic into moulds to make handles for violin cases, rake heads for golf bunkers, fog-light holders for Mini automobiles.
Owner Greg McDonald is perched on a silver medicine ball in the boardroom, watching a video feed of the operation. Before the Brexit referendum, he wrote a note to his 126 employees about why leaving the EU would be bad for jobs. The majority ignored him, voting for it anyway. Now his staff is down to 96. Goodfish’s sales have fallen 20 per cent so far this year. Meanwhile, the weak pound has made his remaining employees’ annual holidays more expensive, and they want a raise. He hasn’t been obliging.
McDonald knows they’re ready to shift supplier contracts to factories on the Continent and wants to pre-empt the loss of business. Setting up a factory in Slovakia will cost half a million euros, a major outlay when sales are falling.
He’s already had to cut working hours from 48 hours a week to 40, hitting his employees’ take-home pay. He wants to keep jobs in the UK if at all possible, but if the calls start coming from his big clients demanding action, he’ll have no choice.
10:30am, London
Chi-chi Nwanoku wakes up late. In the last few days, she’s played concerts in Leicester and Oxford. Next week, her Chineke! Orchestra, an ensemble of mainly black and other ethnic-minority musicians, is scheduled to perform a piece, along with works by Weber and Brahms, at the Concertgebouw in Bruges, the first Continental stop on its inaugural European tour. Then it’s on to Amsterdam, Cologne, and Antwerp.
Or so she hopes. The tour has become a logistical nightmare. Every one of the orchestra’s 60 members needs a carnet — a temporary international customs document that costs about £500 — to allow their instruments to enter the EU. They may also need separate work permits for every country, each of which has different stipulations. The process could take weeks. For EU citizens coming the other way, there are also headaches. They need to apply for “temporary leave to remain” permits.
12:30pm, Calais, northern France
Moore drives up to the first customs checkpoint. A lady with long, curly brown hair wearing sunglasses approaches his window. She asks to see his paperwork and studies it closely.
“C’est quoi?” she asks. What is it?
“One box. Aircraft parts,” Moore says, putting on a slight French accent.
“Cigarettes, alcohol, tobacco?” the woman asks. “Nothing. Zero.” Moore says. With that, Moore rolls forward and his vehicle is weighed.
3:30pm, Isle of Mull, Scotland
The final batch of the 100,000 lemon melt shortbreads Joe Reade’s biscuit factory produces each day are turning gold in his industrial oven. A dozen white-coated, hair-netted workers, including Poles and Romanians, mix Irish butter, Sicilian lemon oil, Brazilian sugar, and British flour. They bake the resulting dough at 200C before dipping the biscuits in Belgian white chocolate. Then they wrap the treats in cream-coloured packets bearing the Island Bakery name in dark-blue lettering.
Come 4pm, the production line stops. Boxes of shortbreads are loaded onto trucks, to be taken by ferry to the Scottish mainland, then on to Germany and the Netherlands. British Airways is one of Reade’s biggest customers, but in all, 25 per cent of his sales come from exports to the EU.
There’ll be no exporting to Europe today. The licence certifying his biscuits as an organic food is no longer valid. He’ll need a new one from the EU to sell his product there, and its rules prevented him from applying for it until the UK had actually left. It could be months
before the permit is approved.
“This is total madness,” Reade mutters under his breath. He took precautionary measures, encouraging his European customers to bring forward orders to beat the Brexit deadline.
3:45pm, Calais
Moore rolls his van onto the ferry. Ninety minutes later, he’s in the UK again. Customs spaces have filled up at Calais, causing trucks to back up in Dover. A queue of vehicles snakes past the tower, through passport and police checks, before being sorted into 250 lanes lined up in front of six ferry berths. One hundred and fifty trucks and a few passenger cars are waved onto the now empty ferry. One of the port’s chief executive officer Doug Bannister’s controllers is on the phone to Kent Police, who’ve activated Phase 1 of Operation Brock, their traffic management plan. She tells them to release another 150 freight trucks from a holding area on the A20 road approaching Dover.
After clearing the port, Moore steers past the spot where a Banksy mural once showed an EU flag being chipped away. It’s been painted over. By now, traffic going the other direction is backed up into Kent — headlights stretch for several kilometres. It’s not as bad yet as the worst of the doomsday scenarios; still, he’s not looking forward to his next trip. The Express jubilantly declares, “Finally! No deal, no problem.” The Mail is more measured, with the tagline “Britain braces for no-deal disruption.” He tries the puzzles in the Mirror before turning in, shortly after 11pm.
Epilogue
It’s at least a few days before most Britons notice the effects of no-deal. Retailer stockpiles prevent any immediate shortages. A government plan to transport critical supplies of medicines, chemicals, and fuel on extra ferries is effective, bypassing the worst border logjams and limiting disruption .
As hold-ups at the ports continue in the following days, supermarket inventories dwindle. Fresh strawberries and tomatoes run out, and prices for lettuce and cucumbers rise. Social media pictures of empty shelves go viral, sparking panic-buying. Factories schedule production shutdowns. Continued confusion at the ports hits supplies of medicines.
For Johnson, his Churchill moment has come. He gives nightly speeches from No. 10, urging calm. Brexit will be worth it in the long run, he says. “Britain,” he says for the thousandth time, “is taking back control.”