Bonus and Debacle

A double bonus over the last few days - I was invited to go on-line and apply for my state pension, which will start in March, and I received my Covid vaccine call-up papers from the local council and can expect a letter from my GP for an appointment any day now. I'm on the at risk register due to my COPD, but I have to say it doesn't debilitate me greatly, until I'm walking up a mountain - even then it just means I have to rest to catch my breath a bit more than Hay.

I'm now going to talk about something I rarely mention - Brexit. The word bonus doesn't apply to this in the slightest - there simply is no Brexit bonus.

The price of the huss has fallen to just 2p a kilo. Exports to the European Union are Brexit-blighted, with fishers across Britain poleaxed by new costs and regulations, their catches rotting before they reach EU markets. It’s costing them millions already. Boris' deal on fishing is so good he's having to offer fish exporters £23m to compensate - but you can bet he won't do it year-on-year. 

Fishermen say it's the volume of paperwork required and the timeframe in which to produce it, which doesn't lend itself to live shellfish and fish generally - that's not temporary, it's systemic. Meanwhile the blusterer-in-chief and Emperor lacking any clothes hails the deal as brilliant for UK fishermen while Rees-Mogg goes off down the rabbit hole with surreal comments about the fish being happier because they're British. I mean - WTF? Yet there are people in this country who will lap it up and believe every word. There again, there are millions in America who still fervently believe, without a shred of evidence, that the US election was rigged. Some people seem to want to be fooled and are complicit in their own gaslighting.

Last year 180 Irish horses ran at the Cheltenham Festival, but this year Brexit leaves Irish racehorse trainers fearing colossal tax bills. Likewise, the cost of taking UK show-jump horses across the Channel is prohibitive for their British owners. Motorsport faces similar fees for cars shipped to EU races. 

The fashion industry – especially companies at the cheap end with small margins – is hitting a rules-of-origin crisis, paying new duties on its many products manufactured outside the UK and EU. 

Farmers Weekly is sending up flares about plunging meat prices, due to delayed exports. 

The Sunday Times reports on the crisis in a motor industry that’s worth £42bn in exports, employing 823,000 people, where car-part delays due to border friction are halting production at some factories. 

More economically deadly is the unseen slipping away of invisibles, where services are already leaking tax revenues. Bloomberg keeps up its grim recording of no likely progress: “City of London’s plight laid bare as Brexit deal hopes fade,” it reports. 

Stena Line ferries has diverted its Great Britain-Northern Ireland sea crossings to the Rosslare-to-Cherbourg route because of delays. 

Manfreight, a 200-lorry company in Coleraine has lorries carrying exports to England return empty, doubling its costs, as English exporters find it too costly to sell to Northern Ireland, and that’s not "teething proplems" - it's permanent. 

The UK’s former ambassador to the US, Kim Darroch, predicted this week that Britain would not secure a US trade deal in Biden’s first term. 

And we're only in week 3 of Brexit, for God's sake.

UK choices meant mechanical, obvious, forecasted and inevitable consequences upon leaving the Single Market, and that’s what the UK wished to do. It’s not French revenge, or bloody-minded Brussels, as the Daily Mail or Express could have their foam-flecked readers believe, but the reality of ordinary life as a third country. Yet Brexiteers refuse, point blank, to see what's in front of their eyes. That's called fanaticism.

Is it a fait accompli and we have to live with it, as Brexiteers maintain? Not by any stretch of the imagination. It was Johnson's decision to remain outside of the Single Market - a sweep of the pen can have us back in a trice, albeit probably without a discount, but even that's uncertain. It would probably also save the Union, which is fast heading for collapse (the collapse of the EU has been touted by Eurosceptics - in the absence of any evidence - to be imminent for the last 20 years). All it needs is for our leader to show some backbone and lead on behalf of the national interest (not his forte, as he prefers to govern for the corrupt Chumocracy) plus some humility and honesty on his part (again, not his forte).

Victor Klemperer made the following observation of the National Socialists in his diaries, but he could equally have been talking about our current government and the Trump administration. "Future historians will praise two features of the National Socialists: their ability to take punishment and their unscrupulousness in misleading the people. In the evening paper they have the nerve to maintain the opposite of what they maintained in the morning paper and the people swallow both." 

We've had a slew of those in the past week - the latest is about amendments to labour laws. In the morning it's denied they will tinker with labour legislation and in the evening they admit they are going to look at changing them. Such U turns have happened so often that they have become the expectation and a tradition.