The more one reads about our preparations (or lack of them) for the changes due to click in automatically on 1 January the more I am convinced we need a deal, if only to get a new "implementation" period. I think the scale of the changes is just so massive that a phased approach is essential. At the moment we are headed for the big-bang to rival all big-bangs.
An article in The Newsletter, a NI online publication, by Sam McBride, says that Brexit remains an "amorphous concept" to most people in the province. But I think it's also true in Great Britain too, McBride says the "looming Irish Sea border seems at worst a bureaucratic problem for haulage companies and port operators." He adds an example:
"This week the academic Dr Viviane Gravey was among the Northern Irish customers of Welsh gardening company Real Seeds who received an email from the firm to say: “Sadly, due to the way that the new UK seed laws will come into play next year, we will not be able to ship seed to Northern Ireland, as it will not be possible for us (or any GB seed company) to issue a plant passport suitable for posting seed to NI”.
"Another company, the Agroforestry Research Trust, issued a similar note saying that it would no longer sell plants to Northern Ireland."
This is apart from a group of 40 food businesses saying they may have to pull out of NI because the costs of completing border formalities will make them uncompetitive after Brexit against suppliers from the republic.
I read last week of VAT changes coming in for overseas suppliers. Anyone selling online direct to consumers in the UK will need to be registered for VAT here and pay the VAT directly to HMRC. Many small foreign suppliers will just give up. Likewise, UK exporters to the EU will need to be registered with up to 27 different countries at up to £5000 a time. It's that or sell to a business which has a valid EU VAT number - which means higher prices or lower profits. They too will probably give up.
These examples are small I know. Nobody is going to die but they will impact the lives of everyone living in this country. But there are an awful lot of them. More than that they will be occurring while the government is struggling to get the people, systems and infrastructure into place ready to handle customs and border processes that we haven't experienced since the single market came into being nearly thirty years ago.
It is fraught with problems and if not delayed will result in utter chaos. Coupled with the coronavirus pandemic and perhaps a winter flu crisis or flooding and one can see this winter has the potential to be very long and cold and hard.
I think that Gove and Johnson have never had to design something that other people depend on. Add to that an almost total ignorance of industry and how things are actually done and you have a recipe for disaster. It is as if Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had been plucked out of an office in Pittsburgh, given no training beyond what you could read in the newspapers, sent off to land on the moon and actually believing they could do it. Gove's well known disdain for experts will soon come back to bite him.
McBride's article goes much wider and he touches on what may soon become another serious issue. NI voted to remain in the EU, unionists were most vocal in wanting to leave. After the referendum, the DUP was jubilant and the nationalists downhearted.
But now NI will, for all intent and purposes, remain in the EU. Unionist's attempt to get closer to GB has backfired spectacularly. But while a land border was anathema to nationalists, a sea border is the same for unionists. It lays the ground for a return to violence.
The next six months will be very interesting. The big-bang theory will soon be put to the test.
