The BBC have an excellent piece on their news website about the sheer quantity and cost of the paperwork needed by exporters of seafood products to the EU. It is stunning. Samways in Bridport, Devon buy fish from local fishermen, consolidate it into truck loads and ship it to countries in the EU. They were among the companies who thought they were prepared for Brexit. The article is an expanded version of Faisal Islam's TV report of a few days ago with more detail of the bureaucracy now involved.
One truck required 71 official forms and a new government website on which the catches are registered has 149 lines fields of data to be filled in by company staff. The data entered includes the name of the vessel that caught the fish and the type of species being exported and so on and eventually produced a paper certificate for that particular shipment which was 27 pages long. This is apart form the export health certificates. The whole thing takes two employees five hours.
The company is thinking about employing a dedicated person at £30-40,000 per year to cope. This again excludes the export health certificates and other customs agents costs. So, their costs will rise substantially but since the whole thing introduces delays the produce does not arrive fresh and the price paid by the importer goes down. Their entire business is at risk.
The shipper now thinks some of his suppliers will decide to discharge catches directly in to ports on the continent to avoid all that paperwork and get a better price.
Meanwhile an importer of chicks in Wisbech is also drowning under a mountain of red tape. They import live chicks and hatching eggs from France and "may" have voted for Brexit, but now say it has created a "nightmare." The owner has been "forced to cancel all work since his last run to France in December and it is costing him thousands of pounds in lost orders at what he says should be a boom time."
Briefings for Britain (formerly Briefings for Brexit) naturally tries to play down the impacts and list ten things we've learned after the first month. Among them no border queues, no shortages and for financial services no big problems. But it admits many firms were unprepared, smaller ones will be especially hard hit, EU agri-food barriers are extremely high, the fishing industry got a raw deal (again) and the NI protocol is unworkable. His list struggles to convince. The best thing it appears is that we haven't run short of food - yet!
The BfB article is by Harry Western (a pen name for a 'senior economist') who last year was urging the UK to walk away with no deal at all. In December he forecast we would get a deal highly unfavourable to the UK and:
"Far from forming the basis of a durable new relationship between the UK and the EU, the deal will be a source of continued friction and acrimonious disputes. Within a short space of time, the UK government will regret signing it and will be looking to escape from it."
His 'solution' and I suspect many other Brexiteers will be to double down and argue for cutting the 'thin' deal even further, going to minimal WTO terms. It would turn a disaster into a catastrophe but that doesn't prevent them proposing it.
Elsewhere, the BBC are becoming a mouthpiece for government propaganda and have an article which I assume was spoon fed to them by Invest NI, a regional business development agency in Northern Ireland. The RDA, a quango I assume, still has an EU flag on its website and presumably still has access to the EU's regional development fund.
This item reports on NI businesses who think they now have a 'significant advantage' and the 'best of both worlds' but nowhere does it say this is what the whole UK had before Brexit. It presents Brexit as some kind of benefit to NI businesses but for them nothing has changed - it is the rest of the UK which has been downgraded. Their 'significant advantage' has been obtained by disadvantaging thousands of businesses across the UK.
A ventilation manufacturer says it has won a six-figure contract in the Republic because of the Northern Ireland Protocol and the MD, "I think the real benefit of the Northern Ireland Protocol I don't think we have fully realised yet is the unfettered access to the EU and to the UK. That gives us a very significant advantage over competitors based in the UK."
I wonder if the UK based competitor is equally pleased? I think perhaps not.
This is the kind of convoluted nonsense you get into when you are trying to argue something that is entirely irrational. I expect more of it as the year wears on.
