Dover and out.
With only a short break for WW2, Dover has been the door to the Continent for the UK for centuries.
But now there are queues for miles, a failed computer system, new checks, huge delays, oh and a company so incompetent it fires its staff and closes down for business at the busiest time of the year.
The real problem is not today’s delays but what they mean for prices and deliveries in future. Drivers do not like sitting in traffic jams, their just in time cargo even less so and their managers even less again.
There is plenty of business on the Continent, the UK needs people to want to deliver here and to do that they need to know they can do it quickly, safely, profitably and reliably.
At the moment the UK is not providing any of these things.
Like so much else this government seems incapable of doing anything about these problems. It is not even clear that it sees them as problems at all.
Ministers’ faith in the power of the free market seems to stretch to the belief that government can deliberately make things more difficult for the economy and business will not just cope but prosper as a result.
Not a policy our economic competitors seem keen to copy.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.