Opinion

ON the day after the referendum on Brexit, I wrote a piece entitled ‘Here there be dragons’. It was intended to focus peo How I wish the intervening period had been full of thoughtful discussion, but it has not.

The Remain camp has concentrated on the ‘lies’ told by the Brexit camp, and Project Fear, which apparently wasn’t lies, continues.

As I declared then and reiterate now, I am for Brexit.There are so many reasons for leaving this rich country club but I will avoid turning this into a soapbox for my views.

For those who hope for a second referendum, please explain to me we believe that there is any point to it if, as we have been told repeatedly, referendums are a bad way to manage a country?

So it seems that we are heading towards Brexit and perhaps even a ‘no deal’ Brexit.

Maybe it is time to start looking at opportunities and lining up our targets for Brexit, instead of allowing fear of the unknown to paralyse us. Where there is risk there is opportunity.

My experience of the EU from the outside, in South Africa and Mozambique, were salutary lessons.

At that time, and I am sure still, Scottish salmon had a tariff of 25 per cent going into South Africa.The Norwegians, apparently so much worse off outside the EU, had negotiated a reducing tariff falling to zero per cent within a year of that point.

On approaching the SSPO to see if this could be changed or even lobbied for, the response was deeply depressing. It was unlikely to happen at all and if it did, it would take years.This proved to be the case and we swiftly lost our customer to a Norwegian.

discovered quickly that despite Mozambique being one of the poorest countries in the world, it was almost impossible to export to the EU.

The complexity of regulation and the slowness of change meant that a species.You can imagine how fast we gave up when told that this was unlikely to take less than a year.

If Brexit is going to happen, maybe we should heed these examples.We already know we will have to form trading relationships with countries as a separate entity.The question is, what is the priority?

Scottish salmon is still exported mostly to the EU and US and these will be top of the list for trade agreements anyway. So who comes next and what sectors can we ally with to apply the maximum pressure?

industry working groups been set up yet? And if not, why?

As for poor Mozambique, good enough to give aid to but not good enough to import from, what can we do?

I would suggest that the UK needs to become much more open to products from the poorer nations of the world and help them to export their products to us.

Of course, we will have to ensure that the product quality matches the most stringent standards.

But rather than giving aid with one hand and refusing imports with the other, we should spend the aid trying to help nations develop aq- uaculture for their own and our markets.This would be a wonderful way to help countries to develop but also for us to use our expertise.

We are now faced with a blank sheet of paper (just as I was when I started writing this). We can either decide we cannot cope and that there will be a disaster (often the way I feel!).

Or we can look at all the positive outcomes that could come from this. As I said back then, I doubt that Westminster will be any more of a friend to rural industry than the EU was, but corner.

Now is the time for us all to start targeting what we want from Brexit and ensuring that we exert as much pressure as we can to get it.

In the days when ‘Here there be dragons’ was put on maps to describe unknown areas, people still travelled into them and discovered they had little to fear. Now is the time to push ahead, forge part ideas and compete on the world stage with the world class prod

ucts we have.