Polly Toynbee

Trade has plummeted and red tape has blocked our borders. Is that what ‘protecting our sovereignty’ meant?
Now we know that British exports to the European Union plummeted by a cataclysmic 41 per cent after Brexit on 1 January, what next? This is not the “slow puncture” predicted, but a big bang. Yet so far, it registers little on the political Richter scale.
It should shake the government to the core, but voters are well protected from this unwelcome news by our largely pro-Brexit press. Nor does BBC news, under Brexiteer mortar fire, dare do enough to rebalance the misinformation. Saturday’s Financial Times splashed that killer trade figure on its front page, but the Daily Express splashed “Flying start for US trade deal”. There is no “flying start”. Meanwhile, an EU legal action against Boris Johnson is starting this week, for his reneging on the Northern Ireland protocol and thereby imperilling the Good Friday peace agreement.

Trade fiascos
The Sun, Daily Mail, Daily Express and Daily Telegraph barely cover the EU trade fiascos, says Dr Andrew Jones, part of an Exeter University team monitoring Brexit media stories since the referendum. Currently, Jones says, those papers’ main Brexit story is Britain’s triumph over the EU on vaccines. That trope always omits the fact the UK could have purchased the same volume while in the EU, but it has become the Brexiters’ clinching case.
Prof Katharine Tyler, of the same Exeter team – and currently re-interviewing voters from Lincolnshire, the south west and Newcastle – finds no shifting views in either leavers or remainers. Nor does she expect real-world effects to have much impact given Brexit’s strong connection to national and personal identity. Bad trade news bounces off sovereignty-seekers, for whom any economic price was always worth paying.
Unless people read the Guardian, the Financial Times and a very few others, the Brexit damage is still invisible, with no lorry queues jamming motorways nor empty supermarket shelves: these may yet happen when delayed import controls are imposed next January.
Manufacturers may say they are in “Dante’s fifth circle of hell” but their loss of exports is out of sight of most of the public. Take Seetru, a Bristol industrial valve-maker I’ve followed throughout Brexit. Half its exports were to the EU: as UK exports to Germany fell by a shattering 56 per cent, its managing director, Andrew Varga, finds his products “stuck for eight weeks in German customs, swamped by bureaucracy, massively clogged”. Fearing the loss of his just-in-time customers, he’s flying his products to Germany at “10 times the cost”.
He calls “doctrinaire and ideological” the creation of a UK kite mark, forcing him to re-register 30,000 products under two systems. “That,” he sighs, “is what they call sovereignty.” Brexit never “took back control” or escaped “Brussels bureaucracy” but instead blocked the borders with impenetrable thickets of red tape. No extra time, no illegal “grace period” unlocks the impossible Irish conundrum now heading to court. Once out of the single market and customs union there were just two options, both terrible: a UK-splitting customs border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland; or a peace-deal-breaking hard border within Ireland. No wonder Johnson lied about what he had signed.
The only answer is Norway-shaped: putting all the UK into the single market and the customs union restores frictionless trade, with no Irish borders. But Britain is still emotionally miles away from recognising that necessity. Meanwhile, this Pandora’s box of a Brexit swarms out new pests daily. Take the 83 per cent collapse of a fishing and shellfish industry that was once the Brexit campaign’s talisman. David Frost and Michael Gove seem never to have known that each boatload of seafood needs 71 pages of customs forms; nor did they understand the fatal fish “depuration” rules that left stock rotting on the dock.
Political optics were all that mattered to these brilliant negotiators, so they thought they could abandon the services and the banking sector, despite services making up 80 per cent of our economy and financial services 10 per cent of tax receipts. So City firms have moved £1.3tn of assets to the EU already, and within one month Amsterdam has overtaken the City as Europe’s largest sharetrading centre. Daily, new stingers fly out of the Brexit box. “Au revoir to au pairs”, mourns the Telegraph, with no visas for student family helpers because they earn under £20,480. The British Cactus Society mourns the loss of its industry to customs barriers. Students mourn the needless loss of Erasmus, its inferior Turing replacement abandoning cultural swaps for teachers.
Spine-chilling message
How’s global Britain doing? We used to be good at soft power, spreading UK influences in culture, language and the ideals of democracy; but that liberal stuff nauseates the most ideological Brexiters. So they swing their wrecking ball at the BBC, the UK’s worldwide voice, cutting its funding level by 30 per cent while putting its cherished independence under sinister attack. The British Council, spreader of English language and culture, is cut too. Even UK collaboration in global scientific research – on antimicrobial resistance and the climate crisis – is halved. Cutting aid to Yemen mid-famine sends a spine-chilling message about what Britain has become.
Refusing the new EU envoy ambassadorial status is a political gesture to keep the Brexit base fired up. Fighting the EU in the courts may be relished by them. The more damage Brexit does, the louder those who Ken Clarke calls “headbangers” yell for “revenge”. Mark Francois, chair of the hardcore pro-Brexit European Research Group, this week calls not just for tearing up the “intolerable” Northern Ireland protocol, but for defaulting on the £20bn owed to the EU. Treaty-defaulters, debt-dodgers – these wreckers make us new enemies and no new friends.
Labour is increasingly aggressive in attacking Brexit fallouts, despite bombardment by Tories as “remoaners”. The question is when the sheer weight of evidence exposes how astonishingly bad the Brexit deal is. The remain ship sailed long ago, but the boat to Norway may eventually dock here. In the meantime, EU legal action reinforces our government’s reckless isolationism. There the ministers stand, as if reprising that wartime cartoon from the cliffs of Dover: “Very well, alone!”

Toynbee is a Guardian columnist.
-- The Guardian