This week in Brexitland, January 7th, 2022
Happy New Year all! 2022 begins with the same Brexit fun that gave so much flavour to 2021. Let’s dig in.
The Leave.EU website is captured by the European Union
We start this week with a light, human interest story. 48,000 websites with an .eu suffix have been taken down because they were not owned by EU citizens or residents, i.e. they were owned by Britons resident in the UK, which as we need to remind ourselves every once in a while, is no longer part of the European Union. This has affected many sites near and dear to some of our hearts, including Leave.EU.
Let’s be fair here - Leave.EU clearly knew this was coming for a while and switched their internet home base to https://leaveeuofficial.com/ some time ago. However, I mention it because apparently the domain will be available to grab on Monday morning should any citizen or resident of an EU country wish to do so. I’m not suggesting anything nefarious here and since I’ve been robbed of my EU citizenship, I’m in no position to do anything about this myself, but maybe some of you out there might be eligible for and interested in such a purchase? Again, not suggesting anything at all here, please don’t read into what I’m saying as advocating for an EU resident to register Leave.EU and fill it with anti-Brexit information. Not suggesting that at all.
Brexit gets a poor report card - from Brexiteers themselves
One of the few things about Brexit I enjoy is watching Brexiteers themselves lament the whole thing. Of course, they are critical of the Brexit we got as opposed to the idea of leaving the EU itself - the “Real Brexit has never been tried” gambit - but these things have to start somewhere.
Take the Daily Telegraph. One would struggle to think of a more pro-Brexit mainstream publication and yet even there we see signs of “No, not this Brexit!” emerging already. They ran an article this week entitled Time is running out to prove Brexit is not a historic failure which is as spicy as the headline suggests. It is behind a paywall, and I imagine not a lot of you reading this are Telegraph subscribers, but if you can read it someway or another it’s a fascinating insight into intelligent Brexiteer thinking. To summarise as best I can: the government hasn’t “taken advantage of” the supposedly great opportunities Brexit has to offer. Instead of stripping back the state, it has been built up. The search for the deregulatory nirvana is very much going strong within the right-wing Brexiteer camp and is one of the reasons they have mostly turned on Boris Johnson.
Another article in a similar vein from this week was in the Spectator, which asked the question How Well is Brexit Going? The answer according to the author of the piece, Annabel Denham of the IEA, which it is fair to say is probably the most Brexity of think tanks in Britain, is: not very well. The piece looks at four areas: Trade, NI Protocol, Immigration, Regulation. Annabel gives a score out of five for each of these, grading Brexit thus far. How’s it all going?
Trade: 3/5
NI Protocol: 1/5
Immigration: 3/5
Regulation: 1/5
I make that 8/20 altogether, so Brexit gets a 40% approval score from Annabel. Now, if you read the article itself, it’s because she feels that the current government is not taking advantage of all that Brexit has to offer (although she does lament the end of freedom of movement, saying it was “unequivocally beneficial” to the UK, which is nice to hear). However, this article and the Telegraph one cited and indeed, several others I could go over here beg the question: why don’t Brexiteers actually like Brexit very much?
Levelling up doesn’t seem to apply to regional ports as a result of Brexit
It seems there are even more reasons to be annoyed about the Brexit red tape that was introduced this week, and the further red tape coming in the summer. Turns out that there is a regional effect that is negative as well.
Basically, while Dover will have problems keeping up with the new changes, it will get there. Meanwhile, it will be very difficult if not impossible for smaller ports to carry out the checks required. This will result in even more regional disparity, as even more of our goods begin to have to travel through Dover and at best, only one or two other ports, to have any chance of meeting the new, Brexit-caused requirements.
There is a very good article in the FT on the subject this week, which is what inspired this section, but there’s so much more to say on the topic. If one of the major ideas behind Brexit was to ‘level up’, particularly between north and south England, this port issue looks like a major problem. It could result in higher prices in the north of England for certain goods, as an example. Of course, one of the major themes of Brexit was ‘Global Britain’, so the fact that we are having to worry about which ports in the UK will be up to enforcing massive amounts of protectionism is idiotic in the first place, but I digress.
This is one to watch. Particularly given the stuff around free ports this government likes to bandy about as some sort of huge Brexit bonus. How will regional ports cope with enforcing Brexit red tape? Excuse me for being cynical, but I doubt this government has an answer to that question. Like most things Brexit related, a lot of it will come down to fate.
Happy New Year once again. If you haven’t subscribed please do so and I’ll be back at the same time next week with the worst of Brexit the next seven days has to offer.