Johnson capitulates on Brexit

In an extraordinary announcement yesterday, Michael Gove made clear that Johnson is reversing his line that “taking back control” from Europe means tighter controls on UK borders. There will be no border checks on goods entering the UK from the EU until July next year, Gove said. This is not just a capitulation to EU demands that the UK accepts a level playing field if it wants to trade normally with Europe. It is also a sign that the hard Brexit camp in government may not be as hard as previously thought.

The climb-down means that full, proper customs checks will not take place on lorries entering the UK at Dover or coming off the Eurotunnel freight trains at Folkestone. Instead of a lorry by lorry check, the government says there will be a “light-touch” regime probably not very different from what exists today.

The official briefing given to the Financial Times and its star Brexit reporter Peter Foster who was poached from the Daily Telegraph is that ministers do not want to make life more difficult for businesses that are struggling against the economic hit of the Covid crisis.

There have been endless calls since the health crisis shuttered the UK economy for Boris Johnson to extend the UK-EU talks into 2021, as there is no realistic chance of them being finished this year.

This is because the UK shows no signs of compromise and the EU negotiator, Michel Barnier, has little leeway from the 27 governments he speaks for, as they cannot make major concessions to Brexit Britain due to internal politics.

Johnson will talk to three EU presidents — of the Commission, Council and Parliament — by Zoom on Monday, but the fine-tuning of the most complex Treaty negotiation in centuries for Britain cannot be done via computer screens.

So far, Johnson and his ministers have been adamant in the Commons and on the BBC there is no question of softening the UK line. Now there is.

Britain will have a one-way open border, but government has little choice. Eighty-five per cent of all our fresh vegetables and fruit and two thirds of our bacon, bangers and ham arrive in 10,000 lorries each day from the continent. Lidl alone has 1,300 trucks bringing food each day.

If each of those lorries were subject to the routine WTO-type checks, then even a five minute inspection would produce queues going to back to the Belgian border.

Having seen the panic buying that stripped supermarket shelves at the start of the Covid crisis, not even Boris Johnson would want to risk massive food shortages or the possibility of rationing that would arise from a WTO or No-Deal Brexit disrupting food supplies.

Nevertheless this is the first significant acknowledgement that the “oven-ready” deal promised by Johnson last autumn or the endless claims by Brexit ideologues from 2016 onwards that the government, in the words of Michael Gove, “hold all the cards and we can chose the path we want” were always hyperbole.

Now reality breaks in. The u-turn on Dover may allow lorries to arrive in Britain with all sorts of goods, or food, or even smuggled immigrants to enter the UK without effective checks. But it does not work in the other direction.

As Jürgen Maier, until recently the head of Siemens in the UK points out, the lorries going into Europe will still face checks. This is because once they arrive on the continent they will find that the French and other coastal nations that receive imports from Britain have invested — unlike Britain — in building major new lorry parks and customs checks lanes to carry out rigorous checks. Vehicles will wait in queues for hours, if not days.

London’s boast is that it can pull off a trade deal with America (unlikely to happen so easily if Trump is defeated.) But this is seen by Europe’s powerful agri-food lobbies as cause for concern. They worry that low quality cheap food, treated with hormones and chemicals in a way unacceptable according to existing EU (and British) norms, will arrive in Britain from the US and that some of it will be re-exported to the continent.

So the instruction from 27 sovereign parliaments and governments in Europe to Barnier is to take no risk with Britain becoming the gateway for US low-quality food, which according to the US Centre for Disease Control leads to 6-8 million food poisoning cases in America every year and 6,000 deaths.

Negotiations have to end in October to allow 27 governments to ratify any deal and to allow the legislation time to go through the Commons. The u-turn on Dover customs checks shows just how worried ministers are that Brexit is not turning out as figures like Nigel Farage, newly dismissed by LBC as one of its star presenters, promised us.

Over the years, Johnson has never been afraid of changing his position. Hauling up the white flag to Europe over the white cliffs of Dover will be the first of more adjustments to reality, to avoid the damage to the UK economy from an ideologically driven hard Brexit.