Deeper than Brexit
Sure, everyone expected the first weeks of Brexit to be a fiasco. What isn’t these days? But I don’t think anyone expected the initial victims to be fishermen (after all the commotion about fish!), Percy Pig and musicians.
The disaster around food supply chains is a fairly predictable consequence of a government that always prioritises messages over detail. Signing a deal on Christmas Eve and implementing it on New Year’s Day was always a terrible idea (remember that the EU offered them a 2-year transition period), and inevitable led to key issues being forgotten or miscommunicated. The fact that M&S cannot send its sweets (which are produced in Germany) to its own stores in the Republic of Ireland without paying VAT twice is a ridiculous but inevitable consequence of spending 30 years building up integrated supply chains and then trying to unwind them over a holiday weekend.
This has practical consequences for all of us – in December you could spot a bargain from a company in any EU country and see it arrive in a few days. Now you might face a Customs bill of tens or even hundreds of pounds. For nothing.
The failure to allow musicians to perform (without an expensive work permit) says something deeper. This was planned.
The government was offered a deal on mobility that includes 90 days of visa-free travel, including short-term work. They turned it down – in favour of 90 days of visa-free travel for leisure but not work. Very lovely for Boris Johnson’s dad but utterly useless for most of us. Tragic for those people, such as touring musicians, who want to visit a number of cities and countries for short periods. This means sacrificing a successful British industry for pure ideological reasons.
It betrays a basic dislike of foreigners and of British people who want to spend some time abroad.
This is the same government that has withdrawn from the Erasmus student exchange programme and presided over continual cuts to teaching languages in schools, as schools have to cope with increasing pressure to do ‘more with less’ by combining ever greater focus on exam results with inadequate investment. It’s not just formal education that is under pressure, but the softer links between schools and cities – an area where Bristol has a grand tradition, with some of the UK’s oldest twinning relationships with Bordeaux and Hannover becoming harder to sustain.
No-one gains from stopping young people studying or British musicians performing. Central Government should recognise this and negotiate a more sensible solution – now, not in 2024.
Rob Logan
Labour Candidate