The BBC are claiming that the NI protocol will require 30 million customs declarations annually. This is according to an employee of the Japanese computer company Fujitsu who are bidding for the IT system to process them all. The HMRC has estimated the average cost of handling each declaration at £32.50 which means the permanent annual cost of doing business across the Irish sea, but internally in the UK, will be about £1 billion a year. This is in addition to the one-off £355 million of infrastructure cost needed to prepare for it all.
It's another cost of Brexit. Normally governments trumpet news of a reduction in costs to business but as we know we are living in a post-Brexit world where the extraordinary and the abnormal becomes commonplace and quite acceptable. What it means is either increased prices or a billion pounds a year that won't be invested in making British business more efficient, probably a combination of the two.
One wonders how long it will be needed for. Not very long I suspect. There will come a time when the penny will drop and everyone will wonder what on earth Britain was thinking about.
Professor Chris Grey has an article in Prospect magazine (HERE) about how time has run out for businesses to prepare. He concludes:
"Now there are fewer than eight weeks to go until the entire way that the UK does business with the EU will change to something which is still not fully defined. For at least four of those weeks, and very possibly more, the country will be in a new lockdown. There is no point in—and even less justification for—government handwringing about businesses being unprepared. Rather, it should take responsibility for the situation its decisions have created and pursue the only remaining solution, which is to seek to extend the transition period regardless of whether or not there is a trade deal struck in the meantime."
I agree with his analysis. Johnson, Gove and others in government know they will need to get an extended implementation period. They will blame business for having to ask for it but ask for it they must. This is quite obvious.
The PM is like a jerry builder desperate to avoid the client being able to see the result of his work, knowing it will be a total shock. He cannot be so stupid to believe that the nation will welcome the dog's breakfast that Brexit has become. I suppose back in early 2016, when he was wrestling with the choice of backing Brexit or not he never thought it would be like this. His choice then was finding a possible way to No 10 or supporting Cameron, a man he had been envious of since the younger Old Etonian became leader of the Tory party in 2005, and staying on the back benches. He chose the former as we know.
It occurs to me that Brexit has been driven by a series of erroneous assumptions. A lot of newspaper editors and proprietors assumed Johnson knew what he was talking about in the early 1990s when he was sending back reports of straight banana rules. He didn't.
In turn, the public assumed the newspapers were reporting the truth or at least mainly the truth, no matter how ludicrous it all sounded and genuinely began to believe Brussels was staffed by malicious bureaucrats determine to regulate us out of existence. Realising these myths sold newspapers, owners and editors assumed they had hit upon a real gripe that the vast majority of the population shared. Farage didn't help with his UKIP party.
When Cameron launched the campaign. Voters assumed the leave campaign's leaders, Gove, Johnson, Cummings and others like Liam Fox and John Redwood knew what they were talking about. It all seemed great, get away from all the regulation (the ones that made trade easier, slicker, cheaper and safer) but still enjoy access to the single market. The leaders assumed the EU would negotiate something beneficial for us as an ex member and a large export market for EU goods. David Davis assumed Mrs Merkel and Mercedes would rescue us from our own folly.
After the leave campaign won, the electorate assumed it would be a quick and easy process and that we would be better off afterwards.
As time has passed we can see every one of these assumptions has turned out to be wrong.
Many years ago, in a management training course we were told never to assume anything. As an aide-mémoire we were taught that to do so risks making an "ass of you and me" - get it? It is a lesson I have never forgotten. And now I can see why. Soon others will too.
As an indication of what's happening, the latest YouGov poll shows that 50% of the population now thinks Brexit was a mistake while 38% still believe it was right. But looking behind the headline figure you can see that the leave voters are slowly changing their minds.
If I average the first 4 polls in August/September 2016 you can see 92% of leave voters thought the decision was right:
