John Whelan: Border control delays casts doubt on Britain's commitment to Brexit
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British exporters don’t like it, Irish exporters welcome it, but the stop-start on getting Brexit done is a cause for frustration, no matter what side of the Irish Sea or the English Channel you are on.
The British government’s push back of the Brexit checks on food, plant, and animal produce imported into Britain in September begs the question of how committed the British prime minister Rishi Sunak government is to fully exit the EU.
The recent delay, besides giving Irish exporters a competitive advantage over British producers, also holds out the prospect of kicking the Brexit can further down the road to a point where full implementation may never happen.
This prospect seems more likely following British Labour Party leader Keir Starmer’s recent promise to seek a major renegotiation of the Brexit agreement if he wins the next election, due by end of next year.
He will be pushing at an open door in Brussels, who are seeking ways of bolstering trade to combat the damage done by the war in Ukraine, as well as Russian embargoes on fuel, wheat, and grain.
It has not been lost on EU leaders that the UK continues to be the second-largest export market for their products and the third-largest source of imports and too much damage to their economy is in the interest of nobody.
There are options for both the EU and the British government under the current Trade & Co-operation Agreement to renegotiate the terms as early as 2026. With the British general election due by the end of 2024, there is potential for both Conservatives and Labour, if in power, to hold back on any further disassociating from the EU and negotiate a new, freer trade deal.
Recent polls indicate that the British public would welcome better relationships with the EU, particularly as they see rising everyday costs as a legacy of Brexit and don’t relish further hits to dinner favourites’ including French or Irish cheese, Spanish olive oil and dried meats from Italy. These are sentiments that Mr Starmer’s party are keen to emphasise, with their mantra that further Brexit measures on imports, if they finally become law, could drive up soaring grocery prices further as households grapple with cost-of-living pressures.
There have been repeated complaints from business leaders about a range of post-Brexit obstacles to trading with the EU and the lack of effort by the British government in seeking to address them.
Most recently, three of the world’s largest carmakers, Vauxhall, Jaguar Land Rover, and Ford, told the government that it needed to renegotiate with the EU to change post-Brexit rules due to come in next year that they say threaten Britain’s largest export industry and its emerging electric vehicle production.
Even the British services industry, particularly finance, where trade is less dependent on the EU than in goods, the lack of association with the EU has proven problematic.
A recent example is the area of data protection and the associated transfer rules between Europe and the US, where the British parliament needed to rapidly approve a UK-US data bridge as an extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework which was adopted and took effect in July, to ensure they were not excluded from important transatlantic services contracts.
Also impacting EU-UK relations is the war in Ukraine, which has pushed new countries either to join Nato, or to seek EU membership, or to relaunch their bilateral partnership.
These matters, besides impacting EU-UK relations, also creates opportunities for the two parties to revisit and readjust their trade co-operation agreement in light of the new geo-political reality. In fact, the general elections forthcoming in the UK before 2025, and the Trade & Co-operation Agreement review foreseen by 2026, offer a significant opportunity for the UK to repair the major act of self-harm brought on by Brexit.
But, short of rejoining the EU, Irish exporters and importers large and small, would strongly welcome any EU initiatives to strengthen co-operation with the UK to regain some of what was lost with Brexit.