The post brexit deal, one month on. It’s not going well, both trade, which is down, some say by 68%, due to the economic consequences of non-tariff barriers to entry, mainly paper work, and the consequences of agreeing a border in the Irish Sea are placing massive strains on the Good Friday agreement. Here are some notes.
- The brexit we’ve got, by Chris Grey, I have picked some quotes at https://diigo.com/0jpwga
- The FT on trade & NI, dated Feb 11th 2021
- And the FT on Euro Capital Markets; they’re going, mainly it seems to Amsterdam
- The FT, on five vulnerabilities to the oven ready deal
And,on the blog,
where among other things I say,
Again, I over-estimate the Tories; if I was planning to fuck up the economy, and betray noisy element of my electoral coalition, I’d have sort have planned to do it over a period of time, inspired by the instruction manual of how to boil a frog, hoping they wouldn’t notice. But no, within days, it’s clear that its useless to catch fish if you can’t sell it, that a customs border between Britain and Northern Ireland is going to be a problem in supplying northern Irish supermarkets, that warehousing jobs are going to move to the continent, that exporters are going to have to open European offices, or in the case of some food businesses stop exporting, that exported goods in transit over the turn of the year will be returned and/or burnt and that supply chains will be disrupted impacting British manufacturing productivity. While we may be in a tariff free agreement, the trade border is not frictionless and this friction will cost people money, their jobs and in some cases, patron owned small businesses, many with long histories of success will sadly go under. We need to remember Boris’s summary of his industrial policy, “Fuck Business”.
Chris Grey, see above, says,
Those consequences continue to be seen and will get a lot worse when the UK introduces the import controls it was not ready to enforce when the transition period ended. The damage Brexit is causing – just to take a selection from this week – is shown in the heartbreaking stories of individual businesses from cheesemakers to meat processors to lobster exporters to oystermen, in the staggering 50% increase in the cost of road freight from France to Britain, in the decline in German exports to Britain, in the collapse of trade through Welsh ports, in the jobs that would have been created in the UK by JJD Sports going to the EU instead, and in business surveys such as that showing that one in ten Japanese businesses will reduce their UK presence as a result of Brexit whilst none – none – will expand it, and that showing (£) that half of British exporters are experiencing problems described as ‘worsening’ and, even, a ‘nightmare’.
My writings on brexit and the post-brexit deal are being spread out across this wiki, as I write narrow and small snips; you can search on the tags, brexit, or postbrexitdeal or for the word brexit . You can also look for the tag brexit in the blog.
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