Pay wall. I blame Brexit.
The Brexit delusion: I’ll talk about it (so you don’t have to)
Seven years after the vote, where are the freedoms we were promised by the Leave cheerleaders, the extra £350 million a week for the NHS, the bonfire of bureaucracy?
Give it a few years and we’ll be living off turnips. Must have missed that bus. Must have missed the one that told us tomatoes would be spoken of as a luxury item, or that rationing would be back, for cucumbers. Saw the bus about £350 million a week going to fund the NHS, but then taxes rose in 2021 to boost social care anyway.
Why? Cos Covid. Cos Ukraine. Cos lettuce. No, ignore that last one. They might not be available for a few weeks, like a lot of salad. Look, next time, maybe don’t believe everything you read on a bus. Except there won’t be a next time. We’ve done it now. We’ve gone. We’re out. Well, most of us. There might be some small print to do with Northern Ireland, but nobody understands that and certainly not the people who assured us it wouldn’t be a problem. The point is, there’s no going back. That ship has sailed and we’re not on it, as we’re still queueing at passport control in the harbour, because the document that used to let us stride through with a cheery wave and a merry bonjour to all now needs lengthy inspection and a stamp. It’s another of our Brexit freedoms. The freedom to queue. The freedom to be told what groceries you are allowed to buy this week and to pay more for them too.
And because we’re British — and God, are we British now — we’re too polite to talk about it. Oh, we’ll waste entire news bulletins on the Windsor framework or the Northern Ireland protocol, or trade deals that were going to be the easiest to sign in history, but seven years on we have moved about as far as a chicken in chlorine, but people are embarrassed. They don’t mention it because the conversation becomes a row or ends in accusation or recrimination and, basically, we’re fed up with that. Deep down, we’re nice. We like to get along. We’re an overpopulated island. It helps if we find points of reference, if we mine our similarities, the positions on which we agree. Indeed, Prince Harry does seem an ungrateful and overprivileged pillock and we want our house back. You’re so right, another series of Fawlty Towers is a terrible mistake. How can it ever be as funny? But we never talk about the thing that’s made the country poorer. Meaner. Worse. We never talk about Brexit.
So that’s what we’re doing here. For all those people who don’t want to talk about it, we’re talking. For all those people who never mention it, we’re mentioning. Come on, it’ll be good. It’ll be cathartic. Don’t worry, it’s a safe space. And I’ll start.
Do you know what gets on my last nerve? Remoaning. Remoaner conspiracies. Remoaner plots. Remoaner elites. Look, I’ve never remoaned in my life. I’m refurious and I don’t really care who knows it. But I’m not moaning. Moaning is what I do when the water people set up another three-way temporary traffic light system at the bottom of my road because the drain that bursts every time it rains is overflowing again. That’s moaning. This is something different. This is wishing the banishment of an entire political class because of a decision they made that was so utterly selfish, stupid and counterproductive it beggars belief. Liz Truss got outlasted by a lettuce? Good. She could be outwitted by a lettuce too. The one thing she got right — Truss backed Remain — she then reversed. She saw the way everything was going and thought it was good. She changed sides.
I write about football for a living. The unexpected happens. In 2018, a Brazilian player called Philippe Coutinho agitated to leave Liverpool for Barcelona. He got his wish. Subsequently, Liverpool won their first Premier League title, the Champions League, the FA Cup, the League Cup, the European Super Cup and the Club World Cup. And Coutinho got sold to Aston Villa. Yet he did enjoy some success with Barcelona and, at the time, his move made sense. Barcelona did look a bigger club, the better bet. Nobody, at the time, imagined Coutinho would miss out on one of the great eras in Liverpool’s history.
Yet Truss saw the future. She saw the terrible difficulties separation from Europe was causing. She knew the impossible complications it had wrought, she heard the falsehoods advanced on its behalf. And still she switched. If Coutinho had a crystal ball, he wouldn’t have left Liverpool. Truss was given that insight and jumped anyway. The lettuce should have been odds-on from the start.
And patriotism isn’t the last resort of the scoundrel. The last resort is the excuse that your big idea only failed because it wasn’t done right (see Truss also). Communism will work, they said — it just needs doing properly. And now another bunch of zealots think that of Brexit. It isn’t true. Brexit, like communism, is failing because it is a rotten idea. Brexit didn’t work because the people in charge weren’t smart. Brexit didn’t work because islands need trade and shouldn’t be isolationist. Brexit didn’t work because, if you’re on the same side as Nadine Dorries, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nigel Farage, you’re not dealing with the brains of the operation.
Note Brexit’s language, how everything around the project is oversold. Brexit opportunities. Brexit freedoms. If there were all these freedoms and opportunities, it wouldn’t need saying. We’d know. We’d see it; we’d feel it. We’d visit a friend in hospital and notice how much better everything was since they got that extra £350 million each week; we’d go to the supermarket and remark on the cheapness and abundance of the produce. The net figure of those who now think Brexit is having a beneficial economic effect compared with 2021 numbers wouldn’t be running at -27 per cent.
Rees-Mogg was our minister for Brexit opportunities, but not for long. He may have needed another lie-down on the front benches, so fruitless was his search. Appointed, February 8, 2022; gone, September 6, 2022. Opportunities discovered? None that was trumpeted.
And if Brexit Britain were a land of opportunity, we’d know by now. We’d know because the one undeniable success of the Boris Johnson government — the vaccine rollout programme — has been attributed to Brexit even though it’s another misdirection. Regulation 174 of the Human Medicines Regulations Act 2012, allowing the temporary approval of an unlicensed medicinal product in the case of a significant public health threat such as a pandemic, meant Britain could have been in the EU and still independently bought and licensed the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine, and government statements at the time confirmed this.
But that’s detail. And we don’t do detail any more. We had a prime minister who didn’t care for it, a campaign of misinformation based on a bonfire of the experts and it turned out James McClean knew more about how Ireland worked than the Conservative and Unionist Party.
Who’s James McClean? Well, it’s time to get the ball out again. He’s a footballer and republican, 96 caps for the Republic of Ireland and currently playing with Wigan Athletic. From his breakthrough as a Premier League footballer, McClean has famously refused to wear a poppy-embroidered shirt around the time of the Remembrance Day commemorations, causing great displeasure among those who have never understood that the freedom fought for includes the freedom not to wear a poppy. He has been subjected to death threats and has been booed by supporters, including his own. During his time with Stoke City, he was fined by the club for posting a picture on his Instagram page that showed him teaching his children during the Covid lockdown. “Today’s school lesson — history” read the caption. The photograph showed the two kids looking obediently at their father, who was seated wearing a black balaclava. Many were unamused. McClean deleted his account and apologised for an “ill-advised and offensive” contribution. Yet on the day the vote to leave was announced, McClean had posted a message on Twitter that read, “Reignition of the flames of reunification #BorderPoll #UnitedIreland.” Therefore demonstrating a better grasp of the complexities of the situation than the majority of the Leave campaign. We’re seven years on and still dealing with the fallout.
Rishi Sunak sweated the details — well, someone had to, eventually — and returned with a piece of paper. “If we get this right, if we get this framework implemented, if we get the Executive back up and running here,” he announced, “then Northern Ireland is in an unbelievably special position, a unique position in the entire world… in having privileged access not just to the UK home market, which is the fifth biggest in the world, but also the European Union single market. Nobody else has that. No one.”
Well, someone else did have that. Us, all of us, before January 31, 2020. Traded frictionless within our borders, traded frictionless within the EU — that’s what a common market is. Northern Ireland is being sold what it already had as if it is some great bargain, in the name of getting Brexit done. The sell is, it’s now over; the truth is, it’s barely begun.
Alison Crouch started the Ham & Cheese Company 17 years ago. She imports from artisan small producers in Europe, mostly Italy, and supplies many of the top restaurants in the country, including River Cafe. On Saturday her premises in Bermondsey, southeast London, opens to retail customers, which is how I got to know her. It was Alison who explained that the real complexities of Brexit for many small businesses haven’t even started.
“Before Brexit there had to be an EU identification number,” she said. “So the companies we used had to undergo a lot of checks anyway. It was already a lot more paperwork and what’s to come, if not the nail in the coffin, is going to be even more complicated. The start of 2024 is the introduction of animal health certificates. So with every single shipment from each of our suppliers we must have a five or six-page form that has to be completed, then signed by a veterinary official to say that the herd is healthy, free from swine flu or whatever. But we are dealing with small suppliers who rear a pig, slaughter a pig and from that pig they make ham, salami, fillet, coppa, shoulder, loin; but each of those items have a different customs code, so now they will each need their own separate health certificate. So the same pig, from the same supplier, on the same shipment, will need six to eight health certificates. But 20,000 frozen chickens in a container need one. It’s nonsensical.
“And I get that cheap chickens in a supermarket are going to feed a lot of people. But what small businesses do has value too. And we’ve been going 17 years. So we deal with everything that is thrown at us. But could we start up now? I don’t think so. It’s too complicated. It’s the biggest ever imposition of bureaucracy, when what they wanted was to cut red tape. It blows my mind. Every bill that arrives from Italy, the position of the wording, where it is on the line, how the sentence is constructed, it’s all got to be exact. The company we use to process this says that 80 per cent of the paperwork comes in wrong. And they are struggling to cope. What then happens is, they contact me and I contact the supplier to say the gross weight needs to go here or whatever. It’s agonising. I’m calling Sicilians up a mountain, saying could you resubmit and put this figure on this line, and they don’t know what the problem is. It’s not meant to be like this, the labyrinthine bureaucracy.”
Alison says the issues started in 2020 when small companies were given grants to install software to make their systems compatible with the new regulations. “And then, on January 1, 2021, they introduced some extra regulations and the software wasn’t compatible any more and I couldn’t do our imports. We had to find an outside company, at huge expense.” This, don’t forget, is the party of business running the show. “They’re really nice on the helpline,” Alison adds, “but then they go kind of silent and say, ‘I’m just going to talk to my colleague about this.’ And then they come back and say there’s no way around it.”
Oh, yes, it’s a first-world problem all right. But this is a first-world country. It’s fought very hard not to have the problems that existed centuries ago. A lot of graft from your ancestors went into forging our cushy modern lives, so don’t let anyone make you feel entitled now. Privileged folk who couldn’t see how good we had it; they were the entitled ones. They created problems that were not there, raised issues that were incidental. They didn’t live in deprived areas. Do you think there’s a tomato shortage in any of the homes where Rees-Mogg resides?
So, sure, artisan Italian ham is a high-end issue. Yet my father, a poulterer, tells me eggs have gone up six quid a box in two weeks. And previously, when that happened, he could source a more competitive alternative in France or the Netherlands. But now he’s stuck with it. So if he’s stuck with higher prices, you are too. And eggs aren’t some luxury item. And neither are tomatoes. Yet now we’re told, by the deputy chairman of the Conservative party, Lee Anderson, to grow our own if there are none in the shops. Self-sufficiency is space contingent, and most people haven’t got space. They haven’t got greenhouses, either. Yet they do have a right to expect tomatoes in “the world’s fifth biggest market” without becoming The Good Life’s Tom and Barbara. This is what happens if you govern by bus slogan and interview soundbite. Stupid nonsense, like live off the land. And eat turnips.
For if there is one root vegetable guaranteed to go off like a distress flare in British minds, it is the turnip. When Graham Taylor was failing as manager of England’s football team, he was sent up as a turnip. Blackadder’s peasant sidekick Baldrick was obsessed by them. It’s not a good look. And yet that was Thérèse Coffey’s glib response to the latest food crisis. Let them eat turnips. At least the French proles got cake.
Brioche, actually. That was probably nearer to what Marie Antoinette said. Anyway, the attribution is disputed. Alexandre Dumas claimed that the Duchess of Polignac said it of the burnt, black and mouldy dough that collected at the bottom of outdoor ovens. Aníbal Torres, prime minister of Peru, used it last year, advocating for the eating of fish when poultry prices ran too high. Even so, much of it sounds preferable to a life of turnips. But don’t feel compelled to mention it. Don’t cause a fuss. Don’t say the B-word. I might, though, so you don’t have to.
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