Everyone's an expert

Yesterday, Faceache showed me a comment a work colleague had made regarding freight traffic flows at Dover. He voted for Brexit and is rabid about it. There have been no queues so far, but that doesn't mean there will be in the future.

He also said he had loooked into the paperwork requirements and it all seemed simple, therefore the fears of delays and shortages were another project fear.

The queues we saw before Christmas were of companies brining orders forward to avoid jams and delays in January, flows this week have been 85% down on normal levels, meaning that any issues encountered have been manageable.

But there are stories of companies finding their EU suppliers rejections POs because sending goods to the UK now is too complex and expensive. Companies finding that were a courier would charge £40 to take a package to Spain it now is costing near £170 and one engineering company who found that their Czech supplier, their main supplier, rejected all POs on Monday, so the company now stands to fail.

It will be a Brext of the small things, stuff that used to be easy or free, now takes added time, apaperwork or costs a lot more. One at a time doesn't seem so bad, but althogether, and without there being any actual benefits will show how foolish Brexit was.

But even as most think Brexit is finished, the new phse has begun, with face to face talks ongoing this week on data sharing, as that wasn't agreed last year, and only a few month extension was agreed. This and in many other areas will show that Brexit is now forever, talks, negotiations, working parties, committees, all talking, slowing commerce down, driving up costs.

So much for free trade.

Even worse, is that the PM's comments at the end of last year, denying that there were any non-tafiff barriers between the UK and EU, meant that many companies believed the trade agreement meant no change, and trucks have been arriving at Dover with no paperwork other than consignment notes.

Brexit will run and run, because like a dog, it isn't just for Christmas.