Brexit damage already exceeds cost of EU membership

Lorries queue for the frontier control area at the Port of Dover in Kent - Credit: PA

The economic damage of being out of the single market and leaving the customs union already exceeds all the subs we paid to the EU in all the years of our membership. This government are now throwing money at damage limitation.

The cost of sending goods to Germany has gone up by 25%. UK lamb orders for France are being scrapped in favour of sourcing from Spain.

The 20,000-tonne-per-year seed potato trade into the EU continent is now on an EU ban because we are now a separate third country. Also banned is sending to Northern Ireland, which remains under EU regulations. Does the farmer plant or not plant as we approach planting season?

Nobody knows.

Boris Johnson and his DEFRA sidekick George Eustice promised farmers there would be no stripping of funding, which enables UK food to be on the shelf at a favourable customer price. Now they are going flat-out in trashing UK agriculture.
A.D.Gill, Barnstaple

Before we joined the EU, I was a young engineer working for a medical equipment company. We had just made our first sale in France, to a large hospital in Paris. The machine had developed a fault and although our engineers were on site, the technical director, my boss, decided that we needed to be seen to respond quickly. So, I was on a ferry the same evening with a spare unit in the boot, and some hastily prepared paperwork.

The douanes were not happy with my documentation so seized the goods and my passport. I was, in effect, arrested and the goods were impounded! I eventually got my passport back but not until my company had paid a fine by bank transfer of 100,000 francs, then about £10,000 pounds. We joined the EU shortly after that so visiting and exporting to Europe really did become ‘frictionless’.

I feel very sympathetic with those companies and their lorry drivers struggling with post-Brexit paperwork.

When will governments start learning from history? Brexit has set us back over 40 years. Small entrepreneurial companies now face an uphill struggle to sell and support their products in Europe.

Frictionless my foot!
Graham Collins, Builth, Wells

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