Happy New Year.....
You’ll be glad to hear I will be blogging less over the Xmas period but I will not totally stop, no least because there is so much to say about 2022.
New checks at the UK’s borders with the EU start on New Year Day and there will be more of them throughout the year. Including massive amounts of testing and paperwork on food and agricultural products. Making trade across the Channel more expensive and difficult.
Now on top of that, the ERG has Lord Frost to join its growing band of carping fantasists, ready to spot any “treason”, “backtracking” or lack of idealogical purity.
So there is no end in sight to Brexit, the new negotiator-in-chief Liz Truss has a Brexit watchdog at her shoulder, rather like Soviet commanders used to have a political commissar to check their tactics were ideologically consistent with communism. We know how well that worked.
The civil war in the Tory party shows no sign of ending even though the Brexit wing won years ago. It can never end because what they want is impossible to deliver, just attempting to appease them is doing immense harm and they will never stop.
This is no way to do business, negotiate or even run a whelk stall, but it is what the UK is saddled with.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.