As the Brexit talks enter the final furlong this week the Confederation of British Industry appealed for a trade deal.
The CBI’s director general, Dame Carolyn Fairbairn, said 77 per cent of companies surveyed by her organisation want a deal, and a deal “can and must be made as talks enter the eleventh hour”.
However vital for prosperity a deal is, regardless of a successful conclusion to the trade talks, chaos will ensue on this island after January 1 for the British government has not made the necessary preparations at its borders, nor has the DUP here. The result in England will be the world’s biggest lorry park. Nicola Sturgeon put it in a nutshell when she described Johnson’s cabinet as “a bunch of incompetent and unscrupulous chancers”. She might also have mentioned their astonishing ignorance of the realities Britain confronts. Remember during his brief tenure as Secretary of State for Exiting the EU, Dominic ‘Raab C’ Brexit, expressed surprise at the quantity of trade passing through Dover? Who knew? Unfortunately Raab C isn’t unique among Brexiteers.
Only in the last fortnight has this crew of incompetents – inexplicably still defended by the DUP at the joint committee on Monday – admitted that they’re going to have to concrete over acres of Kent to accommodate thousands of lorries queuing up to cross to France. In fact, so many are anticipated that Michael Gove, that well-known opponent of the Good Friday Agreement, an “act of appeasement”, plans to recreate the ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Kent, forbidding access to lorries without a ‘Kent Access Pass’ (KAP). So there’ll be a queue to queue.
Very bad news for Irish lorries. The Irish government has been very remiss over the last year in failing to prepare for the easily foreseen mess at Britain’s south coast ports. Dublin has been relying on the Common Transit Convention which allows EU loads pass through Britain without inspection.
Even in the best of circumstances how did the Irish government ever imagine that there’d be some sort of special lane for Irish lorries to ferries in Dover or Portsmouth that would allow them to pass all the English lorry drivers sitting fuming in a queue? No. It’s out of the question. When they’re talking about a possible 7,000 lorries queuing, and that’s just for Dover, the British won’t enforce the convention because even if they wanted to, they couldn’t. Hand to hand fighting would break out. Will Irish lorry drivers be able to join the queue in Kent without a KAP? Where will they get one? Do you think they’ll get one quicker than English drivers? Nope. It’ll be back of the queue in all senses of the word.
What’s to be done? At present about 80 per cent of lorries from Irish ports use the landbridge to get to mainland Europe. Normally it takes twenty hours. No one knows how long after January. What will happen at Holyhead in January? Will the convention for EU goods operate, or will Irish lorries be queued in Wales to minimise congestion in Kent?
The Irish government did ask the EU in 2019 for help with developing direct sea routes to France and the Netherlands, but didn’t pursue it with any vigour; nothing has emerged. A new freight ferry route from Cork to Santander and to Roscoff was developed but withdrawn in January for lack of interest. Dublin has fallen down badly preparing for these entirely predictable consequences of Brexit.
As for this place, the DUP’s Edwin Poots has done his best to frustrate developing border control posts at Larne and Warrenpoint despite admitting they’re a legal requirement. On Monday the EU’s representative on the Joint EU-UK Committee complained time is running out to complete the necessary infrastructure and IT systems. All of which leaves hauliers on both sides of the border in limbo. So, deal or no deal, the British government and their DUP dupes have combined to create chaos.
