The phony Brexit

We are at an odd time in the Brexit story.

Political Brexit happened at the end of January last year, and economic Brexit happened on New Year's Eve.

And the fall out is not much has happened.

No queues, no pictures of angry drivers, or at least from this week, Ministers claiming that the first two days went well.

First of all, the queues we saw before Christmas were from companies and manufacturers bringing deliveries forward to avod being held up by the new checks. Freight flow levels are expected to be low through most of January, it usually is, but the measures taken above mean it'll be even less than usual.

But demand will pick up, and then we will see how things stand up.

“We are going into a test period,” said Elizabeth de Jong of trade body Logistics UK. “If you were running your own business, you wouldn’t do it like this. You would have designed your new processes, you’d have trained people in them, you’d have tested the new systems, you’d have used it with dummy data, you’d have had a walkthrough. Those are all fundamentals of management. We’ve not been able to do any of it.

“There are also cliff edges ahead. In July, we’re going to start import checks as well: that will need more capacity and more people. We’ve also got grace periods in Northern Ireland."

“We need the absolute analysis of what’s going well, what isn’t, where the blockages are and what are the difficulties. We need that honesty and transparency. It’s a shared problem. We will get there and there are a lot of people who want this to work.”

The interacting systems have not been tested, people have not been trained. At the sites where lorries were to queue, there wasn't enough toilet and washing facilities, little or no food, the lack of preparation, only some ten days before the new procedures were to go live, was staggaring. And yet Ministers and the press have skimmed over the chaos.

I read an article from a Polish newspaper about the fact how little food and water drivers got over three days. A litre and a half of water, one meal of buger and fries per day, for which drivers had to wait in line for three hours. Diplomatic access for the Polish Ambassador was not facilitated, so they made a hole on the fence at Manston so supplies could be passed.

One last point on the new Dover lorry park; ever since May announced that Brexit meant leaving the SM and CU, a border was inevitable, and so such facilities would be needed. Three years was more than enough time for a full planning application process to have taken place. Even last July the location was know, but the Government did nothing, instead waited until the last minute to ram through plans without scrutiny because it's what this Government does.

Brexit and reality now live in the same world, no amount of lies and bluster will hide how bad things will get, or not. Just about allocating blame.