Brexit is about to get real

We've suffered the trade and other effects of Brexit for over three years now, some partly obscured by COVID and the war in Ukraine, but they're becoming increasingly clear, both in the official statistics and anecdotally. Exports of goods have fallen by 15% with non-EU exports taking an equal share or even a bigger hit. Meanwhile, EU exporters to the UK have had it easy with their goods arriving here unhindered. That is about to change on Tuesday when the next phase of the non-tariff barriers we have erected against ourselves kicks in.

There are no 'opportunities of Brexit'

Now here’s a laugh. Conservative Home, the party’s unofficial house magazine, has published an anti-Brexit article. Now, I don’t know if this is a first for them since I don’t check it all that often but I bet it’s the first which uses the winning essay in a £100,000 competition organised by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA).  In 2014 when Cameron announced the referendum, the IEA wanted to find the essay that best identified the "economic opportunities and benefits of Brexit." The winning entry was number 170, so I assume there were at least that number of entries and probably many more.

The Horizon inquiry

I’ve been dipping in and out of the Post Office Horizon inquiry on YouTube over the past few months. The questioning of the PO staff is fascinating and in phase 5, the inquiry is closing in on the most senior managers at and around board level. In the beginning, I was convinced the inquiry would find the board was largely ignorant of the problems that seemed endemic in the Fujitsu-designed and operated computer system. However, I’ve changed my mind. Senior people knew about the bugs, errors and defects and essentially chose to cover it up.

Tim Shipman

Tim Shipman is a journalist on The Sunday Times, a closet Brexiteer and a man who thinks his political connections enable him to comment on the broad sweep of world events in an impartial and disinterested way. He has written four books on Brexit, two already published with the third out this week and the final one scheduled for June. Taken together they include over a million words.  I haven't read any of them but from his article yesterday, I think the tetralogy shows that despite years spent writing about it, he hasn’t actually understood Brexit at all, and probably never will.

New border checks coming sometime never

On Thursday we discovered that the government intends to U-turn on its pledge to introduce the next phase of the Border Target Operating Model. This imposes checks and extra costs on plants and foodstuffs imported into the UK from the EU and was supposed to begin in a couple of weeks on 30 April.  We didn’t find out through any official announcement but by a leaked internal presentation from DEFRA seen by the FT which says the checks could create ‘significant disruption’ and therefore the implementation date will remain the same but the number of checks will be “set to zero for all commodity groups,” meaning products will simply continue to be waived through as they are now.

Jessop and his 'workarounds'

There is a dedicated band of Brexiteers who continue to defend their project, not because they can point to some great benefit or even a modest one. They aren’t claiming it's been a success of any sort, nobody would believe that anyway. Neither are they suggesting that it’s made little if any difference. No, they are resting their case at the moment on the fact that it has been bad - but not unbearably so. They’re not like the Hannanites and the Sherelle Jacobites who openly admit it’s all gone horribly wrong, rather they find it hard to accept they were duped.

Britain's stuttering manufacturing 'juggernaut'

Kemi Badenoch is deliberately gaslighting the nation. The trade secretary is again using The Daily Express to mislead and misinform, I assume this is because no reputable newspaper would parrot the rubbish she comes up with. I know many think we are well down the path of post-truth politics and reading the nonsense Badenoch - a senior cabinet minister and possible future party leader remember- seems to be responsible for, you have to agree. She is quoted by the Express: 

The London Stock Exchange is suffering a slow death

Simon Nixon is the chief leader writer at The Times. This doesn't make him an expert on anything of course but I was interested in something he wrote on his Substack blog the other day where he pointed out what's happening on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and asked why it wasn't front-page news. He has worked out what a terrible return you would have got had you invested £100 in the FTSE100 or FTSE250 in June 2016. His post is titled: How Brexit Wrecked the Stock Market. 

Import checks to add £2 billion to UK food costs

The Guardian has picked up a story from some figures produced by the insurance giant Allianz Trade, showing the import checks due to start in less than three weeks will add about £2 bn in the first year to Britain’s imports of plant and animal products. This is apparently about 10% of the value and is set to increase inflation by 0.2%. Coincidentally, the government has also announced the suspension of tariffs on 126 types of goods that we don’t produce or produce enough of in this country. This is claimed by Allianz to cut import costs by £7bn although the report isn’t clear if this is per year or for the whole of the temporary period up until 2026. I suspect it’s the latter.

Badenoch again...

Kemi Badenoch, the UK's Business secretary, has 'hailed' Brexit Britain becoming the world's 4th biggest exporter, overtaking Japan, France and Holland in the process. This is in the Daily Express but the figures apparently come from UNCTAD, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development showing that Britain was behind only China, the US, and Germany in 2022. CityAM also picks up the story but makes an important point. The improvement comes in services, not goods. Their headline is: Services trade sees UK become world’s fourth largest exporter.