A new deal with the EU?
THE UK, according to certain sources, is moving towards achieving a Swiss-style relationship with Brussels in order to facilitate smoother trading arrangements with the EU.
Which is the most sensible idea I have heard being punted around in Government circles for a very long time.
Such a move, however, is billed as likely to infuriate Conservative hardliners who would see it as a betrayal of our ‘Brexit freedoms’.
Those would be the same hardliners, I presume, who still believe getting out of Europe was a sound move despite the economic chaos it has unleashed. As for the ‘Brexit freedoms’ I presume, also, that they mean the freedom to sacrifice four per cent of the country’s GDP because of our now hideously complicated import/export arrangements with Europe – still our largest trading partner, let us not forget.
Arrangements which are so complicated that continental lorry drivers are now demanding – and receiving – bonus payments for crossing the Channel because dealing with the reams of obligatory paperwork are reducing the hours they can actually spend on the road earning money.
Not that massive cross-border shipments are the only ones where forensic checking of documentation is now required. Let me refer you to the case of a friend of mine, a oneman business who operates online but whose direct selling at a handful of trade events accounts for a significant proportion of his annual income.
For years he has been travelling to trade fairs in Dublin, where he has built up a useful and faithful customer base. Before Brexit intervened it was a simple process. He drove to Holyhead, showed his passport, drove on the ferry, drove off the other end, flashed his passport again and was on his way.
That obviously has all changed. He has now been told he needs full documentation: all manner of authorisations and permits – and has to carry a full stock list. Made aware of this he equipped himself at no small expense with what he thought was all the necessary paperwork for a recent trip and set off. This side of the Irish Sea, customs officials riffled through the documents, gave him the all clear and waved him on board.
Over the other side, however, it was slightly different. When he presented the same documents at border control there was a lot of shaking of heads and sucking of teeth and finally he was asked where one specific, correctly filled-in form was.
He said he had not been told he required it and had not obtained it – but pointed out he hadn’t even been asked for it when he went through UK controls, either.
That didn’t work. Without it he was told, he had no possibility of trading in Ireland and his vehicle was immediately impounded. Luckily he has friends in Dublin and one of them was contacted so at least he could get to the hotel room he had booked.
But the next day it was straight back to the port and a rescheduled return ferry, turning his back, he estimated, on somewhere around £4,000 potential income.
Given all the expense he had incurred in acquiring what he thought was a complete set of documentation, he took the matter up with UK customs. Only to be told that the particular document the Irish were asking for wasn’t strictly necessary but so hacked off were they by the British Government’s (and in particular Boris Johnson’s) blustering, bombastic attitude to sensitive Irish border issues that they were now bloodymindedly applying the regulations down to the last comma and full stop. Just to teach the Brits a lesson.
This, then, is the world the hardline Brexiteers have created: this is the atmosphere generated by Johnson and Liz Truss standing on the dingy white cliffs and raising the middle finger in the general direction of Calais. All they have achieved is to instil in the credulous masses in this country the belief that every problem, every setback, every difficulty involved in trading with or travelling to Europe is somehow the result of the EU ‘getting back’ at us for having left – rather than a consequence of their own, unwarrantedly aggressive posturing.
Such a belief recently led to a snivelling social media post asking why Irish visitors entering Spain were being whistled through passport control while the Brits had to queue to have their passports examined and stamped.
Why? It’s because the Irish are still Europeans – something you voted to no longer be. Not that anything the average British holidaymaker complains about should ever surprise us. Recent examples have included a moan to a travel company that on arrival in Portugal the customer found everyone speaking a foreign language rather than English; and a whinge from a British family furious that the Americans they met on holiday in the Caribbean had flown home in only three hours, whereas their flight had taken eight – a fact they labelled ‘unfair’.