The Irish Border blog is a useful source of information and I regularly read it. Last week, they had a post (HERE) in which a couple of things caught my eye, the sort of details I don't see in national newspapers, probably because they aren't sufficiently interesting - at the moment, although they probably will be next year.
The first thing is the Irish border. The EU have released figures showing along the entire eastern border of the EU from Finland to Greece there are 137 crossings. Between Northern Ireland and the Republic the border has 275 land crossings. As the blog says, "Marry that to the amount of cross border activity in terms of people and trade and the scale of the Brexit problem is very apparent. Then add in East West trade".
And at a recent IntertradeIreland event in Dublin, they heard from KPMG about the impact on VAT payments in a possible post Brexit scenario. In short VAT will have to be paid up front by importers into the EU. That has huge implications for small businesses with tight margins who will have to tie up badly needed cash in a VAT system.
These are the kind of implications that nobody (certainly in my acquaintance) thought about before the vote. Brexit will have the capacity to surprise us for many years to come. It will reach into every aspect of our lives in many unforeseen and uncomfortable ways. As the costs and difficulties mount, so will support for a second referendum and the reversing of the insanity that we know as Brexit.
