Global Cold Chain News assesses Brexit and the challenges ahead
London, UK: After four years of intense Brexit negotiations we now have a trade deal that makes trade even more difficult with our largest trading partner. It’s hard to see what there is to celebrate.
And it’s a deal that merely starts an even longer series of negotiations as the detail for specific sectors is resolved.
But then Brexit was never about trade or business. The Brexit debate was always conducted in vague terms as offering a solution to everything. Terms such as sovereignty that the electorate never used and barely understood suddenly gained ascendancy. Brexit allowed a debate to tap into the racism and hostility towards foreigners that has always laid partially concealed in Britain.
Brexit was a dilemma that grew, threatening to split the Conservative party and which may yet destroy the Scottish, English, Irish and Welsh union. And the irony is that it was the Conservative party of Margaret Thatcher that did so much to create the European Union.
The single market and EU enlargement owe much, perhaps all, of their creation to Britain. The single market, perhaps the EU’s great achievement, would not have happened, when it happened, if Margaret Thatcher had not pressed so hard. The blueprint for the single market was a booklet called “Europe – The Future” that Thatcher presented to her fellow leaders at the Fontainebleau summit in 1984.
Equally, without Britain, it is not clear that the EU would have responded so boldly to the fall of the Berlin Wall by bringing the Warsaw Pact states into its fold. It was Thatcher who proclaimed the goal of enlargement in her Bruges speech in 1988 and under a British presidency that talks on membership were opened with the first wave of central European states. It was Tony Blair who later pushed for Romania and Bulgaria to be allowed to join.
Being in the EU really did allow Britain to transcend its imperial past and imagine a European future for itself. It ensured that the inevitable influence of a bigger political and economic bloc to its east was tempered by the ability to have an equal and respected voice within that bloc. It gave Britain a way of being in the world that did not depend on past greatness.
No surprise then that a key line in the Brexiteers’ arguments was about a return to some mythical past of British greatness, standing alone and firm in a colonial world. The Brexiteers’ belief in myth allowed any lunacy to be parroted, provided it enhanced the image of a truly Great Britain. The tedious and infantile Brexit debate of the past four years has eroded what few memories the British public have of the historic and hopeful things that British membership of the EU allowed to happen. Anti-EU rhetoric in Britain, a feature of the prime Minister Boris Johnson’s work as a journalist, encouraged a notion in Europe that the EU will be better off without Britain and that Britain would be better on its own.
And because the debate was never about business or trade, Britain’s business leaders stood aloof, assuming the unthinkable would never happen. But it has happened and reality will soon bite. And that reality has the added sting of a coronavirus epidemic from which there is no escape.
Undoubtedly there will be an economic cost to Brexit. Just how great, and what sectors will he hardest hit, is harder to predict. But what is clear is the effect of the coronavirus, in particular its new mutations that are more infectious. The virus has consequences across all aspects of society, all business.
In November, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) estimated borrowing would be £394bn for the financial year to April 2021 – the highest figure ever seen outside wartime – and way above the pre-Covid-19 expected £55bn borrowing requirement.
Even under its most optimistic scenario, the OBR expects gross domestic product to decline by 10.6% this year – the worst performance for 300 years.
In the face of these numbers, Brexit is a side show.
