The grandly titled Future Partnership paper (HERE) on a new customs arrangement has all the appearance of an attempt to make pure wind look like a robust plan. There is a lot of flowery language and repetitive and obsequious stuff about a deep and special partnerships and shared values but little real detail about what we want the new arrangements to look like. The government thinks there are two "broad approaches" that we "could adopt" which is code for we don't know how to do it can you help? This is after a year's effort.
The broad approaches are (a) A highly streamlined customs arrangement with lots of innovative "facilitations", whatever they are (fill in your own brainstorm results) or (b) a customs system that mirrors the EU's which would be an "unprecedented approach" that could be "challenging to implement" which is of course, Sir Humphrey speak for only touch that via a very long barge pole wielded by a rival whom you hate and plan to destroy.
This has been stretched and reworked endlessly by an army of civil servants, none of whom know what they're doing, and supervised at gun point by ministers who are either mad as hatters or blind drunk. It is threadbare and devoid of any practical ideas or even a recognition of what we have got ourselves into. That or it is perhaps a cry for help. Ian Dunt describes it best as a dog's breakfast (HERE). It has been greeted with a lot of scepticism as a "fantasy" by the EU and political opponents.
What is amazing to me is that in all the years we have been in the EU, even during the most recent period when UKIP were very popular, of all the spurious reasons given to leave, striking trade deals with other countries was never mentioned as far as I can remember. It was always immigration, being unable to deport criminals and petty regulations about bananas that didn't even exist that got the headlines. Trade deals were not a high priority if they were ever raised at all.
Now we are talking about a massive upheaval for everyone in this country in order to achieve something nobody thought was important until last year! The currency markets have obviously had a look at our proposals and decided they don't like them. Sterling is down against the dollar and at 1.09580, has dropped below the 52 week low, meaning it hasn't been worth less against that "failing currency" for a whole year! What does that say about the pound?
In what is described as a "highly streamlined" arrangement the paper says in paragraph 29, "there will remain an increase in administration compared with being inside the EU Customs Union".
And paragraph 30 in the paper says the streamlined process would "require the EU to implement equivalent arrangements at its border with the UK". I assume since imports can arrive by air from anywhere in the EU there is a border with the UK in every EU country as well as Ireland, and all would have to invest in new technology to facilitate this new streamlined process. Who will pay for it? The EU are already asking us to pay for relocating the European Medicines and Banking agencies and no doubt would ask us to pay for upgrading their import/export arrangements specifically for the UK.
And one of the great criticisms of the EU in the right wing press has always been the excess of regulation and paperwork but they are now greeting it almost with enthusiasm. The proposal requires (paragraph 28) business to, "declare goods for import or export and provide HMRC with the required documentation, including customs declarations, safety and security information and any licenses required or supporting documentation (such as that required to demonstrate the origin of goods, as may be required under a future trade agreement between the UK and the EU)".
And what about this in paragraph 41 for the second approach mirroring the EU's customs system, "There would need to be a robust enforcement mechanism that ensured goods which had not complied with the EU’s trade policy stayed in the UK. This could involve, for instance, a tracking mechanism, where imports to the UK were tracked until they reached an end user, or a repayment mechanism, where imports to the UK paid whichever was the higher of the UK’s or the EU’s tariff rates and traders claimed a refund for the difference between the two rates when the goods were sold to an end user in the country charging lower tariffs".
Any more streamlining and we'll all be out of business! The Sun said (HERE) that Britain is "threatening to put in place new laws to slap extra VAT and customs fees onto EU products if Brussels refuses to sign a deal with us post Brexit. Without a new agreement after we quit the bloc, ministers say they would be forced to treat trade with the EU the same as other non-EU countries". Er, no this is the result of what happens when you leave the EU. The Telegraph has the same take HERE.
One of the few bodies to welcome the paper is the CBI (HERE) although this is hard to understand since the proposals are all but impossible anyway and even if achieved would burden most of their members with a lot of additional paperwork.
