There is a dedicated band of Brexiteers who continue to defend their project, not because they can point to some great benefit or even a modest one. They aren’t claiming it's been a success of any sort, nobody would believe that anyway. Neither are they suggesting that it’s made little if any difference. No, they are resting their case at the moment on the fact that it has been bad - but not unbearably so. They’re not like the Hannanites and the Sherelle Jacobites who openly admit it’s all gone horribly wrong, rather they find it hard to accept they were duped.
One member of this band is the ‘independent’ economist and IEA fellow Julian Jessop. He is very active on Twitter. The IEA is of course the shadowy Brexit and Liz Truss-supporting right-wing think tank and is hardly independent. I suppose the ‘fellow’ is an attempt to give it some sort of academic stature to anybody silly enough to take them seriously.
Over the last few weeks, a lot of importers and trade organisations representing businesses in the UK’s food and plant supply chains are desperately worried about the next phase of the post-Brexit checks due to come in at the end of this month. Some are calling for a sixth delay and others are warning of potential shortages. Mr Jessop dismisses their fears as nothing more than crying wolf. He Tweets:
We've been here before, of course.The usual suspects warn of #Brexit chaos, food shortages, etc, but companies find workarounds and these shortages never actually materialise.But hey, they're always just around the corner... 😉 https://t.co/9MpfPWihhd— Julian Jessop (@julianHjessop) April 17, 2024
Note he doesn't suggest importers or food supply chain firms will benefit in some mysterious way from delays and extra costs. That would tax even his ingenuity. No, he says the shortages 'never actually materialise' and that companies will somehow find 'workarounds' to avoid chaos.
One artisan cheese supplier in Glasgow doesn’t have a workaround. Owner Rachna Dheer told the BBC her business on Pollockshaws Road called Starter Culture is going to be ‘eradicated’ by the new checks and I doubt that she is alone.
His post was in response to Liz Webster, a tireless campaigner for British farming. She had retweeted a story in The Guardian about horticultural firms stockpiling produce from the EU to avoid potential problems at the border starting in a couple of weeks.
The Cold Chain Federation has written to DEFRA Secretary Steve Barclay asking him to suspend the checks until October because they don't believe the flashy new border control posts are ready to handle 24-hour turnaround times for fresh produce from Europe.
Now, we may not notice a lot of shortages although I would be surprised if there are none. Stockpiling is one of the ways companies mitigate the risk of shortages, but that is hardly an efficient use of logistics or cash. And yes, no doubt others will have other workarounds and the great majority will survive. But business is a bit like Formula One, you make small incremental improvements to productivity, and cost reductions or offer higher quality at the same price.
But every day you're competing in the same marketplace and if the firms you are competing against spend their time improving efficiency or quality while you are wading through paperwork, stockpiling goods, and finding workarounds to survive, you are slipping backward. Jessop seems oblivious to it all.
Brexit is as I have suggested in the past akin to chucking your offspring into the deep end and hoping they find a 'workaround' to survive. Or pouring sand into the tank of your F1 car as it's sitting on the grid. It doesn't make any sense to me. One response to Jessop came from @BeMoreBarbara highlighting what an utter waste Brexit has been for her own company:
This is a very, very long way from what voters were promised in 2016.
On exports, someone recently posted an image of some UN statistics the other day showing the latest numbers for seven leading economies. What struck me is the degree to which the UK relies on services for its exports:
We are massively out of kilter with other leading economies. It's often said we are good at services but it could equally be argued we are terrible at manufacturing. Think where we might be if we were as good at both as (say) the Americans or the Dutch.
It shows how stupid Brexit was as a plan to 'escape' the EU so we could sign trade deals with the USA, India, and the CPTPP. Trade deals almost exclusively deal with goods. Services are rarely covered at all and certainly not in any substantial way. So we get little or no benefit. We are simply going to suck in more imports.
