I fear we have a long way to go to reverse Brexit, although I don’t doubt it will be reversed at some point. I had an email exchange the other day with an old colleague. He is one of the nicest blokes you could wish to meet and works at a company importing spare parts for machines, mainly from Europe. I emailed him (we occasionally exchange emails but never about Brexit) to ask how it was going with Brexit and all, just out of interest.
He told me that orders that used to take two days to arrive now take two weeks and "as a result of Brexit shipping costs have gone up and the other issue is, we cannot ship direct to the client any longer, so there is more workload for me (and I certainly don’t need anymore), having to check and re-ship each order."
I replied, saying I thought Brexit was a crazy idea, etc, and got another email back which included this:
"It seems strange to me that none of the negatives of leaving were ever really discussed during the campaign. It was as if they thought they had the result in the bag, it seemed to be all about outrageous headline grabbing topics but few of the daily mundane actual positives for staying in the EU from what I remember.
"Rather a shame that these weren’t being discussed until the decision to leave was already made. Perhaps that was the plan all along…"
I assumed he was a remainer and replied again (this is over several days BTW) but this time he came back with links to an article in The Daily Express and another from The Daily Mail quoting The Taxpayers Alliance (TPA) - a bunch of extreme right wing climate change deniers founded originally by Matthew Elliot of Vote Leave and telling me I shouldn't listen to Lord Heseltine (worth £300m) because he used to get £90,000 a year from the CAP!!
Again I replied, this time pointing out Paul Dacre, the furiously and famously Eurosceptic former editor of The Mail got a similar amount but it had the opposite of him! Back came my friend:
"However, I do not like the way the EU operates. It is not democratic, it is headed by unelected representatives who do not represent the views of the vast majority of its population (not just in the UK either) and you do not have a way to remove them, if you do not like what they suggest, as you do in most democratic countries.
"When you think we joined the EU for a common market, that I could support. It’s just what it has evolved into seemingly they want a Single country headed by an Ursula or another similar German/French politician. Who is unelected by the people she serves and unaccountable."
I haven't replied to this yet but Britain has had an unelected 2nd chamber since 1649 and Von der Leyen's appointment was
confirmed by a majority of MEPs (383 out of 705). She had the support of the three largest political groups in the Parliament. None of our senior civil servants get confirmed by parliament.
And she has zero power beyond what the law allows. To say she is unaccountable is just incredible, she is accountable to 27 heads of state plus 705 MEPs.
The EU parliament is still scrutinising the TCA (1246 pages) after 4 months, our MPs didn't scrutinise it at all and were given just a day to approve the legislation implementing it into UK law. And most of the negotiations were conducted with Lord Frost (unelected) and Dominic Cummings (unelected) at the helm with a mandate that nobody has ever seen - assuming it ever existed.
So, if my rather nice mate is a Brexiteer (and I suspect his colleagues will be too) despite it all imposing more costs, delays and work on him - on the spurious grounds that the EU is somehow not democratic or not democratic enough, I despair.
Finally, a couple of things on the NI issue. The issue about mud on tyres that professor Blake talked out (see
yesterday's post) came up again on Question Time apparently, brought up by Bernard Jenkin. The Guardian's Lisa O'Carroll has checked it out:
It was a rule that was existing anyway!!
And note The Belfast Telegraph are
reporting that the
permanent border infrastructure in Northern Ireland won't be ready until 2023! Remember we negotiated a three month grace period. It wouldn't be a surprise to find when they are finally ready, they won't be needed.
What an utter shambles.
