Tuesday 10 March 2020

Safety and security zone - more links to be cut

The government is slowly tightening an ideological ligature around the nation's neck. Every week we discover new areas where plans are afoot to sever important links with the EU. First it was the European Arrest Warrant, then it was Erasmus, next came the Aviation Safety Agency and now business has been told we will not be participating in a 'Safety and Security Zone', adding more paperwork and increasing delays at the UK-EU border. I have to confess I've never heard of this zone but it's obviously serious enough to get the haulage, shipping and freight industries 'up in arms'.


"A note sent to trade groups last week from the Border Delivery Group confirmed that the UK 'is not seeking a waiver in relation to Safety and Security declarations as part of the FTA negotiation' and would be subjecting all goods to declarations 'in line with the rest of the world'."

In a Twitter thread later he explains this will mean a doubling of the 220 million new customs declarations with a further 'safety and security' declaration comprising a 31-field form on all consignments exiting the UK for the EU.
The industry is indeed angry about all the new burden of red tape needed, pointing out that shipments from China takes 30 days and seven from the US, but two hours for Dover-Calais. There isn't the time to complete all the paperwork and consignments sent groupage could involve hundreds if not thousands of such declarations.

In 2018 I posted about the late Christopher Booker and an article he had written for The Telegraph on the yawning gap between the truth and what we're told. Nothing to do with Dover-Calais but at the time I noticed a comment on-line ridiculing his article, including this:

"The BBC recently [June 2018] interviewed two lorry drivers at Dover to ask if they saw any problems after leaving the EU. Both said 'no problem at all'. One said 'we might get some common sense into the haulage industry again'. The BBC then turned to some 'expert' in the studio who proceeded to claim it was all a disaster, as usual. 

 "But then lorry drivers are just ignorant plebs who probably voted for Brexit. They are just part of the millions who actually keep the country running instead of yapping about it endlessly, doing a far better job in their own profession than any politician, so what do they know ?"

What did they know indeed.

Foster's article speaks of 2000 trucks per day crossing the Channel in 1992. This is now 10,000 a day on average - 15,000 some days. SMMT the motor manufacturers trade association produced a graphic showing just how much in the way of vehicle-making components use the Folkestone or Dover/Calais route every day:


This is just the automotive sector. It shows just how interconnected we are. The 1100 trucks are just the number coming IN to the UK every day to supply car plants.

Last year there were fears that we might be headed for a hard Brexit by accident, but it is now hard to distinguish between the government's declared objectives and a hard Brexit. They are morphing into each other.

I honestly don't believe what is happening is genuinely British government policy.  It cannot make any economic sense, least of all for the areas of this country still dependent on manufacturing, to have all these extra costs, delays and plant closure risks loaded on to them.  Removing ourselves from EU agencies for no good reason is simply stupid. It makes no sense.  Unless that is you assume it to be a negotiating ploy to remove as many possible levers as you can from from the EU side in the first part of the trade talks.

If Brexit Johnson and David Frost can get a 'skinny' trade deal by the year end, in 2021 we will begin demanding a few tweaks and extras to wheedle our way back in to many of the benefits of membership that we are now rejecting. I hope the EU is wise to this, as I am sure they are.

On Covid-19 I must say I have no confidence in the PM or the Health Secretary and I think we can only hope for the best. We are limiting our trips out, not stockpiling, but certainly reducing the number of visits to the supermarket and cutting out any non-essential journeys. Plus washing our hands as soon as we return and much more often during the day. 

Over in the USA clinicians are tearing their hair out as Trump desperately tries to play down the virus as if it's nothing. The Washington Post, no friend of the president, reports him being surprised that anybody in America actually dies from influenza. Trump said:
"I never heard those numbers [36,000 a year dying in the US on average] . I would’ve been shocked. I would’ve said, ‘Does anybody die from the flu? I didn’t know people died from the flu.’ … And again, you had a couple of years where it was over a 100,000 people died from the flu.”
It's even more shocking when you learn his own grandfather died of the flu' in 1918.

The New Yorker has an article about the same thing. The author says:-

"Physicians and public-health officials told me, as they have told many other journalists, that they are dispirited by the President’s public pronouncements, saying that he has added to the danger of the crisis by minimizing its scale and the need for rigorous precautions. Has there ever been a less serious President?"

"Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at Harvard’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health and a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, told me, 'We need the President to put the well-being of the American people before his re-election. And that requires open discussion and accurate information so that we can, along the way, condition people to what’s coming next, not to pretend that this is not a serious threat and they should just continue life as usual. His interest in being re-elected is in conflict with the truth and people’s best interests'."

I fear the same might be said of the Trumpette in Downing Street.
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