The Mail on Sunday had an extraordinary diatribe against what it referred to as the "curse of border bureaucracy" and the "pointless" and "nonsensical" border formalities which British exporters to the EU now face. You would never imagine that its sister paper The Daily Mail had spent years campaigning in favour of Brexit and demanding that we leave the single market and make ourselves a third country having to deal with border bureaucracy.
The editorial refers to a "powerful" article by Archie Norman, boss of Marks & Spencer and a former Tory MP where he rails against the "fandango of bureaucracy, extra costs" that Brexit is creating.
The Mail say:
"Bureaucratic rigidity threatens to condemn this country, and the EU itself, to a wholly needless crisis over trade between the UK and the Brussels-ruled bloc.
"In a powerful article today in The Mail on Sunday, Marks & Spencer chairman Archie Norman dissects the problem and warns of dire consequences to both sides if it is not quickly resolved. He says border inspection arrangements have been ‘set up to fail’, being wholly at odds with the modern world.
"Thanks to obsolete rules drawn up nearly a quarter of a century ago, when computers were still a comparatively minor feature of life, British exports to the EU are already being pointlessly hampered by multiple demands for paperwork that will mostly never be read."
This is harking back to 2018 and the fantasy ‘alternative arrangements’ to manage goods passing international borders, especially the one with the EU, without paperwork. These were proposed by another Tory MP, Kit Malthouse to resolve the NI border problem. They became known as the Malthouse compromise which the EU flatly rejected, calling it the 'madhouse' compromise.
You may laugh but The Mail calls for the UK to "unite with the EU to crush the curse of border bureaucracy."
It is however, a first tentative step towards reality by those in the vanguard of Brexit. For the first time it explicitly recognises that non tariff barriers are damaging to trade. To that extent the Mail has moved on from 1973 and is in the mid 1980s when Margaret Thatcher appointed Lord Cockfield to spearhead the drive towards a single EU market.
Soon, I expect them to reach the early nineties, a time when everyone else in Europe recognised that a single market was impossible without common, harmonised standards and common employment rights, environmental policies and so on, specifically intended to create frictionless borders.
It meant agreeing and signing up to common standards and allowing a supranational legal enforcement mechanism.
By the time The Mail has reached the logical conclusion it will be far too late and the EU27 will only allow us to rejoin the SM and the CU if we agree to accept their rules. To become a full member of the EU will take years of trust rebuilding.
However, the Mail article elicited a response on Twitter from the deputy director of The Adam Smith Institute, Adam Kilcoyne to a tweet from trade expert David Henig:
The oh so slow dawning realisation that this government dramatically raised trade barriers (in the middle of an existing economic shock) and this has consequences. https://t.co/0o13ojd0Gt
— David Henig (@DavidHenigUK) August 29, 2021
When it was pointed out to him that the EU has not raised any barriers and that the UK simply asked to step outside the existing ones so all the pointless bureaucracy would apply to us, he doubled down:
Yes it did. https://t.co/zSus1TViZW
— Matt Kilcoyne (@MRJKilcoyne) August 29, 2021
The ASI is a right wing 'think tank' advocating free trade and market capitalism based on Adam Smith's book The Wealth of Nations. It is not all that transparent about its funding but it seems to have lost its way a bit.
I am not convinced Adam Smith himself would dismiss the EU as a protectionist racket but I think he would see it as a reasonable attempt to get a few minimum standards for the better protection and improvement of people's rights and working conditions.
In many respects these free traders are like religious fundamentalists, believing that the words of men like Smith must be taken literally centuries after they were written and in a world which is very different.
I am surprised that a deputy director of the ASI can't see that 27 nations trading with each other in free and fair competition is a good thing.
