This week’s Brexit news felt like the calm before (and after) the storm. In the House of Commons, PM Tom Tugendhat and other members of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee grilled the Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab after the storm of Kabul. Neil Coyle’s – probably rhetorical – question ‘Why is Global Britain so isolated?’ once again exposed for everyone to see that Johnson’s government is fuelled by slogans, not strategies.

Also this week, unresolved issues around the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) start flaring up again after a relatively calm summer. At the occasion of Irish deputy PM Leo Varadkar’s visit to Northern Ireland, the Democratic Unionist Party’s reiterated its opposition to the NIP, which reminds us of the emptiness of another Brexiteer slogan, that of the ‘oven ready deal’ and the ‘easiest deal in human history.’

In the meantime, shortages continue to spread to more and more sectors of the British economy and the clouds above British consumers’ heads seem to grow ever darker, while the search for solutions continues to be hampered by Brexiteers’ continuing focus on the symbolism of Brexit rather than substance and realism.

Shortages

After Nando’s and McDonald’s last week, this week it was Wetherspoon’s, IKEA’s, and Coca-Cola’s  turn to announce shortages in their supply chains. The lack of consumers goods may still seem like minor nuisances, but there are signs that more essential services start being affected and people’s livelihoods may soon be at risk.

Thus, the next issue on the horizon is a shortage of drivers for waste management vehicles. Three councils in Devon have written a letter to Priti Patel to warn that the HGV driver shortage is affecting rubbish collection. Their plea for a relaxation of immigration rules is unlikely to be successful, with business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng ruling out this possibility once again earlier this week.

Similarly dark clouds are gathering in agriculture, with pig farmers warning that up to 70,000 pigs may have to be ‘destroyed’ due to labour shortages and lack of capacity in slaughterhouses. Rising feed prices make the situation worse, leading to an existential threat for some of the farmers.

Of course, all this can be put down to ‘teething problems,’ the pandemic, or brushed off with reference to similar issues in other countries. The problem is that in the UK, the situation may get considerably worse still due to Brexit with grace periods on food safety checks coming to an end on October 1st.

The shape of things to come: Brexit red tape and consumer prices

To get a sense what the situation may look like in the area of food and agriculture once full border checks are in place, the example of the import of household plants, where border checks came into force on January 1st, 2021, is interesting. Post-Brexit trade arrangements mean that there are no pre-notification, certification, and inspection requirements for the import of plants from the EU. The government also introduced a fee of £5.25 for documentary checks on the import of plants in June. All this new Brexit red-tape means that the cost of a £9.99 plant increases by more than £1 due to the additional administrative costs. The Telegraph quotes the chairman of the Horticultural Trades Association as saying that “[a] lot of what we're facing is self-imposed by the British Government and regulators rather than just as a result of Brexit itself. Our frustration comes in because these are issues of our own making.” Once border controls are fully implemented, many more sectors and products may very well face similar problems of increased administrative costs.

It is only a question of time before these increased costs will start hitting consumers. Indeed, as one owner of a pub chain admitted on the BBC’s Today programme this week (@ around 6:15am), it is hard to how increased costs due to shortages and additional administrative procedures will not be passed on to the consumer in the medium-term.

 Dis-united Kingdom

With shortages spreading and most likely becoming worse over the next months, the Brexit effects remain a dominant dividing line in British society. This is despite the fact that various public figures and news outlets do everything they can to move on from Brexit.

Thus, the BBC tries to avoid the B-word like the Devil avoids holy water. For instance, the title of an article on delays to rubbish collection in Wales, suggest that the pandemic and driver shortages are to be blamed. One has to read on to find a mention of Brexit. As Peter Stefanovic has pointed out on twitter, this is hardly a coincidence, but reflects BBC’s new line regarding Brexit.

When mentioning Brexit is inevitable, the BBC is keen on spinning it – in line with Government discourse – as an opportunity rather than a problem. In a report on lorry driver shortages, the boss of an EU haulage company was asked about the impact of Brexit on the industry. While he was unable to say how many of his 8000 new hires this year were formerly working in the UK, he insisted that the current situation presented an opportunity for his company (@ 6:19am). That may of course be the case, but while this may sound like a ‘Brexit dividend’ to some listeners, what is really going on is quite the opposite. The reason why the UK may become an opportunity for EU-based haulage companies is simply that due to drivers quitting the industry or moving back to Europe, the demand for drivers has gone up at the same time as supply has shrunk. This means companies can charge more for their services creating the possibility to offset increasing costs due to Brexit-red tape, work permits, and border checks. So, this is a case of a ‘Brexit dividend’ reaped by EU-haulage companies who currently find it easier than UK companies to recruit drivers, while for British consumers the bottom line is clear: increasing prices to offset the increasing costs of transportation.

To be fair with the BBC though, beyond the obvious decrease in political independence of the Corporation due to recent appointments, it increasingly finds itself caught in the middle between two factions of a British society divided by Brexit.

Thus, while left-wing publications like The Canary criticise the BBC for ‘bias by omission’ when (not) reporting on Brexit, right-wingers keep up the pressure on the Corporation when journalists do suggest that Brexit has a negative impact on Britain.

This illustrates the importance that Brexit has acquired in British society. It has literally become the most salient cleavage in British society providing a source of identity and cutting across classes and previous party allegiances, as a new study by two political scientists shows. The study shows that a considerable proportion of pro-EU Conservative voters have abandoned the party, while Eurosceptics who previously supported other parties have started to support them. What this shows is that, five years after the Referendum, voters’ attitudes toward the ‘in or out’ question dominates other, more substantive, policy preferences – such as those towards the level of public welfare spending and redistribution – as the main motivator to vote for one party or another.

Strikingly, the study also shows that once you have changed your allegiance due to your stance on Brexit, this may then affect your preference on these other substantive issues. Voters who start supporting the Conservatives over Brexit adopting their preferences on welfare spending, immigration, and others.

These finds illustrate in impressive and worrying fashion one of the potentially most devastating effects that I have blogged about many times before, namely the complete dominance of British politics by the largely symbolic issues of Brexit. Due to the symbolic battle over Brexit, the actual problems facing the country are being pushed into the background and solutions are ever more difficult to be found, because the pro-Brexit government’s priority is to maintain electoral support by insisting that Brexit is working, or denying that it is failing.

Indeed, we continue to be stuck in Brexit politics where falsehoods and lies are used to justify at any cost the choice of Brexit. Thus, Wetherspoon’s chairman Tim Martin was widely quoted in the press this week for rejecting claims that his pub chain’s beer shortages were due to Brexit. Instead, he blamed trade unions – more specifically industrial action at Heineken – for the shortages. This explanation is characteristic of Brexiteer arguments in that it defies reality, not only because the threat of industrial action at Heineken does not explain shortages of other brands of beer, but also because the industrial action he is referring to was averted. But in the absence of any real Brexit dividends and faced with increasing evidence of Brexit disadvantages, a staunch retreat into the realm of the dishonesty is all that is left. While Leavers may agree with Brexiteers that lies during the Referendum campaign can be excused by the expected advantages resulting from Brexit, it remains to be seen whether the public will remain equally forgiving when the same strategy is used to mask the fact that the promises were actually all false.

Solutions?

The opposition is starting to increase pressure on the government to finds solutions for the various issues created by Brexit. Yet, as the Business Secretary’ reaction to calls for relaxation of immigration rules, it would seem that government remains hell-bent on sticking to its guns. There are indeed few signs of movement for instance in terms of a possible alignment of UK standards on EU sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) rules to avert any further disruption to trade after the end of the grace periods.

With the government and Brexiters digging in, it increasingly looks like we are still some way away from reality forcing those in power to start looking for real solutions for the issues created by Brexit. The current strategy – beyond kicking the can down the road when things get tricky – is to apply a Band-Aid to a gaping wound. Thus, rather than adapting the new points-based immigration system to the realities of the UK labour market (see my post from last week), make-shift solutions are preferred. This week, sausage producers were among the first ones to start using prisoners to fill the post-Brexit gaps in the labour market.

Long-term solutions also seem elusive regarding the problems that Brexit caused in Northern Ireland.  After a cool summer, it may very well become a heated autumn. At the occasion of Leo Varadkar’s visit, the DUP has brought into play further extensions of the grace periods of trade in goods between the GB and NI, which Varadkar dismissed as long-term solution. Brexit Minister Frost and EU Commissioner Maros Sefcovic are expected to meet in NI next week to discuss the impact of Brexit on the supply of medicines in NI. On neither of these issues does there seem to be much movement on either side. While Frost recently struck a more conciliatory tone regarding the need to cooperate on the implementation of the Protocol, the fact remains that this call for cooperation does not come with any change to the UK government’s refusal to unilaterally align with EU SPS rules; while the EU will not give ground on the integrity of the Single Market.

It may well be that while reality has started sinking in in the past weeks, things will have to get worse still before fantasy can be replaced with reality in post-Brexit Britain.