The National Audit Office has issued a report today on the UK's preparedness for border controls as and when Brexit happens (as I think it will, I am afraid).
Their conclusion (with my comments) is as follows:
Effective management of the border is critical for the UK after it leaves the EU.
It's a pity no one told the Leave campaign, in 2016 or those remnants of it that still exist now.
It is fundamentally important to our national security, economy and international reputation.
Keep reading, and you'll realise all three are being shredded, right now.
Leaving the EU will trigger some important changes to how the border is managed, but making such changes is not easy. It requires significant effort and the coordination of large numbers of organisations, many parts of government and millions of border users.
It's a pity no one told the Leave campaign.
If the government reaches a withdrawal agreement with the EU, industry and government will have until December 2020 to design and implement any new arrangements.
That's mighty wishful thinking.
This could involve significant work, such as the implementation of new customs arrangements, and the time available to meet these challenges is not long compared to many complex government programmes.
In other words, the NAO think it's nigh on impossible.
However, the scale of this change will be nowhere near that required if the UK and the EU cannot reach an agreement.
Someone smiled when they wrote that. And then went outside and did the honourable thing.
If there is no withdrawal agreement, the government has recognised that the border will be ‘less than optimal'.
No, they didn't: they came back and added that as a footnote.
We agree with this assessment, and it may take some time for a fully functioning border to be put in place.
In other words, we'll be a nation-state without a functioning border. Which reduces us to something less than a functioning nation state when you think about it, because one of the identifying characteristics of a nation-state is that it has an identifiable border and we won't have that.
Individuals and businesses will feel the impact of a sub-optimal border to varying degrees.
The master of understatement strikes again.
The government is putting in place coping responses where it can.
For that read 'but we can't find where'.
How effective they will be remains to be seen.
Which in civil service speak is as close to saying that this is going to be a disaster and there is no way around it as anyone dares go.
I should add, I agree with this assessment, barring its optimism, which is significantly over-stated.
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Sometimes I dip into this blog and read the thoughts of a person who thinks government is good at preparing and planning for things in normal times as long as they have enough money to spend.
Today it’s clear that they do not.
What sort of preparations should a local community, say something the size of a 50 house street or a church congregation be making in your view. Say a budget of £10k is available – the purchase of a generator, lots of tinned spuds and pasta perhaps. Or a lottery so that 2 people can get their behinds out of Dodge and start their lives again in a new country?
I have no simple answer to that as yet
Here’s one thing that came to mind the other day:
https://twitter.com/NeilImperator/status/1054879658888626177
Doctors are limited in the amounts they can prescribe. I gather this is purely political, the aim being to stop health tourists from coming over here once a year for their scrip, despite lack of evidence they were doing that anyway. Anyway, will meds still be easily available by then? The effects of Brexit are likely to be felt rather before the Brexit date itself, I imagine, as people and businesses make immediate plans which don’t include the uncertainties of dealing with the UK. I’m hearing cheery news on the medicine front though, a researcher on an FB forum, seems genuinely legit, claims she read stuff from Big Pharma from a couple of years back which suggested they’d effectively prepared for all manner of Brexits. Irony of ironies, we who are medicine-dependant may yet be saved by the greed of the pharmaceutical companies as they won’t be wanting to lose all those repeat customers. In other good news, buying a flotilla of ships to bring in supplies of essential medicines is being considered. That’s the good news. The bad news is this is being arranged by Chris Grayling. True! Just kill me now why don’t you? 🙂
I suppose it’s all Corbyn’s fault. Most things are.
He could be clearer in his proposals, bit 70% of the Labour Party who disagree with him know that
Just one darned thing after another. It beggars belief that such basic, probable outcomes wouldn’t have been foreseen, planned for and preempted. Impact studies? What impact studies? Once the financial and societal costs of the likely Brexit outcome have eventually impacted & been properly calculated (maybe a decade hence), who will be held to account? The principal perpetrators will likely have retired, like Cameron, to their ill-gotten sunlit fields, consulting for some global US corporation/think tank or profiting from a City sinecure. As with the GFC, the aggregate costs will be borne by the population at large. Plus ça change …
Have we ever held a prime minister to account?
Certainly not Blair
So why his heir?
Touché!
Given that it would appear that there are already no Customs Officers at put borders (see: http://www.progressivepulse.org/?s=Customs+officers), it would appear that smugglers and terrorists will no longer need to creep into our country, at dead of night, boats with muffled oars, landing at some remote Cornish cove, but will both be able to march in in broad daylight, bringing their illicit goods, materiel and munitions with them!!
Indeed
To be fair, because the UK is not in Shenghen, every time we leave the continent by car or by plane, there is quite a bit of checking going on at customs.
When we get to the UK port/airport, a lot less is done, if any, as they rely on the Shenghen area to have done the necessary checks and passed on any information or concerns.
Will this change with Brexit?
We will have to “declare” again, be checked again, pay customs if we need to. That’s for individuals, imagine freight!
Hence the M20/26 car park. That only one of them. The whole of Heathrow will have to be re-designed.
Anglesey and Pembrokeshire will need to be concreted over, etc…etc…
They’ll probably be very welcome too, given they’ll have to be satisfying market needs to stay in business.
Mr Dickie,
Your argument, and the following comments seems to presuppose that it is part of the Government’s intention to achieve “Effective management of the border”; whether in Ireland-NI, for goods and services, or over immigration. I am sure that the Government wishes to present the appearance of being tough on borders, especially on immigration for the comfort of its popular Brexit constituency, but this has no purchase on reality beyond the rhetoric and the lurid Redtop headlines. Effective management of the border seems to be the last thing on their mind, because there is virtually nothing on the border. Failure to invest in, develop and prepare the vast on-the-ground Customs-Border resource required to effect “control” speaks to the existence of other priorities.
Only a little over 50% of immigration comes from the EU; the rest from the wider world. London could not function without continued immigration, not merely from the high-paid technocrats, finance specialists or other professionals, but at the other end of the scale – from the cleaners, the low-paid service sector, who keep the metropolis from collapsing under the weight of its own excess, and supply the basic services, are themselves supplied mostly from outside the UK.
The Government wish to protest about immigration for political advantage, but are unlikely ever to do anything about it. They can’t; they just do not wish to inform the public. Instead, expect non-EU immigration actually to rise sharply after Brexit, with at best around zero net effect on numbers, and the white vans to continue to whizz about the country. The Government will wring its hand if found-out; and quickly find some convenient asylum seekers to arrest at 4am, and expel quickly thereafter, in the spotlight of Britain’s one-eyed media – as a demonstration of how tough it really is on immigration.
All of that will be accompanied by a great hoo-ha about border ‘technology’, but I suspect the Government is largely indifferent whether any of it actually works. Brexit is a programme solely for public relations. The ideological Brexiteers are not interested in the implementation of controls over anything, or spending the resources to do the work. After all, all that kind of thing is just anti-free enterprise; the Red Tape of the Nanny state. What they want is open doors, open markets and no taxes. Free-for-all.
What you think of as “creeping around… with illicit goods” is just good old British buccaneering……….
After Brexit, if we must have it, we will not be retreating from Moscow or thereabouts in winter with no transport or socks. A few survive even this level of bungling. I don’t mean Richard is exaggerating. Brexit is something no sane system would leave to the sloganeers and their effect on the masses. The truth has long since been a casualty of fascism on all sides. Our essential problem is the Tories and their claimed non-ideological ideology are spread through society (the model seems to be that of Mein Kampf chapter six). This deluding world-view swats off empirical fact in favour of a cacophony of balance. I have nothing to add to the facts. I can’t help remembering 21,000 squaddies and an over-large constabulary could not control the Irish border in Ireland. Whatever happens, our lives won’t get better without understanding how dire our system really is.
My sentiment this morning is that it will get worse
But true, not as bad as retreat from Moscow
[…] Out all this together and there is only one possible consequence of no-deal and that is economic mayhem. I wish it were otherwise but unless the EU decided to impose no sanctions on the UK for leaving without a deal (and I cannot see a legal way that they could do that) then nothing else is at all likely, especially as they will seek to maintain a border even of the UK is likely to be almost wholly unable to do so. […]
It’s obvious that what we need (besides not leaving) is more time to get prepared.
But even that is too much ask for it seems.
Indicative as ever that Neo-liberalism still rules – creating chaos and disruption makes as much money as it ever did.
i heard there was an entire airfield on standby somewhere at a good rental and not used at the moment
So “the enemy within” has spoken, as Farage would say: the country is ill prepared for the storm ahead.
“The enemy”, the Civil Service, is unpatriotic, plotting to subvert “the Will of the Daily Mail”, whose owners and editors are such patriots…
Meanwhile, the “friends and enablers of Brexit” are well prepared.
There’ll be plenty of profits to be made from this, they’ll find ways, they always do, wealth is built on the spoils of wars and crises.
Start with Cameron, he’s writing his memoirs in his shed, his estate quite secure.
Farage’s EU pension will keep him in cigars and pints of lager, he’s even taken the rare trouble to be present for the vote to increase his EU pension benefit, not that he’s short of a few dollars already. He’ll keep his activities over the Channel, cosy dinner meetings with Wilders, Le Pen, Salvini, Orban…
Rees-Mogg has moved some of his assets away, in Dublin, and to be fair, he also advised us to do the same with ours…or was it the other eejit, IDS? Or maybe even our great former master of the Welsh Anthem, Redwood? Somehow they all blurr in my memory.
Johnson, he’ll keep his money safe somewhere and get paid huge stipends for miserable back-of-the-envelope columns in the Torygraph. No doubt more from other conference sources in the States or elsewhere.
Meanwhile, brace brace, for normal people.
What we have not heard is how the EU countries are preparing for Brexit, what are they doing about the masses of tourists that will still arrive in their countries after Brexit.If planes who’s destination is an EU country are grounded in U.K. after Brexit is the EU filling up their slots already ? Or do they plan to do so ? I see that the holiday companies and airlines here in U.K. are still selling us flights and holidays to EU countries for spring and summer 2019 do they know something we don’t know ? surely they are not selling us all these flights and holidays knowing they will be cancelled because Brexit prevents flights to those countries after 29.3.19 .
What is the EU doing about their goods that are normally sold to U.K. are they now redirecting their goods and finding new markets to sell their goods all that would have to be planned and arranged well in advance of 29.3.19
This is the news we are not getting.
English people voted for Brexit and may be prepared to suffer a great deal to leave the EU but I am Scottish and we in Scotland voted overwhelmingly to stay in the EU ,we are not prepared to see our lives trashed so that English people can sling their hate at people in other countries.
I’m mighty sick of the 800,000 English people that live in Scotland too because nearly all of them voted against Scottish independence in 2014 their English government promising scotland that if it voted NO to independence then we would definitely stay in the EU and now look what’s happened.If those English people living in Scotland had not been allowed to vote in the Scottish independence referendum the YES side would have won and Scotland would now be independent, it was that huge number of English people living in Scotland mostly temporarily for work I might add, that tipped the balance in favour of the NO campaign, they make up nearly a third of the NO to Scottish independence numbers.
This is really all so unfair and unacceptable.
I post this although I do not really think it meets the standard for comment here
Terence –
If all of the English living in Scotland should have been barred from voting, then all of the Scottish people living in England should have been given the chance to vote.
Dunno how many Scots live in England, but I’m willing to bet it’s as least as many as the English living in Scotland. And I doubt they’d all have the appetite for independence that you do.
I doubt there’d be the landslide you predict.
Who knows – if Indyref2 takes place it will be with the knowledge that Westminster accepts and wants Brexit… that being so, I suspect that not only the Scotland resident English would vote for independence, but a fairly significant number of people might move to Scotland to escape an increasingly isolated RUK. As I recall, most of the North of England seemed very interested in moving the border from Berwick to York following the Brexit referendum 🙂
But that’s all conjecture. At least in that respect it’s inkeeping with your comment.
Terence
I think you’ll find that deep in the terms and conditions of air tickets already being issued for flights after Brexit day that there’s a reference that if it all goes pear-shaped its not the airlines fault and you can (to use a Johnstonian phrase) go whistle for a refund!