Broken it

Every few months, as any hy­po­thet­i­cal reg­u­lar read­ers of this col­umn might know, the need is felt to blow off some heav­ily pres­surised steam about Brexit, that event built on an il­le­gally funded cam­paign stuffed with al­ter­na­tive facts which left no less than 1.2 mil­lion British cit­i­zens - 22,000 of them in Cat­alo­nia - de­prived of the right to vote for any­thing, any­where: we are right up there with women be­fore 1920. And that’s not all: in 2017, the Daily Tele­graph, for which Boris John­son used to spin anti-EU yarns mas­querad­ing as news ar­ti­cles, claimed in an ed­i­to­r­ial that it was nec­es­sary ‘to cut the EU red tape chok­ing Britain…to set the coun­try free from the shack­les of Brus­sels’. Well, one of the UK’s main ex­ports to the EU is food, and - now that the Brus­selon­ian shack­les are off - for each and every con­sign­ment of ed­i­bles, an ex­port health cer­tifi­cate (EHC) now has to be com­pleted, con­sist­ing of be­tween 70 and 80 pages, all of which, the blank ones in­cluded, have to be printed out then signed and stamped by a cer­ti­fy­ing of­fi­cer after he or she has in­spected the said food­stuffs. This process has to be re­peated in sev­eral dif­fer­ent lan­guages: Eng­lish, plus the lan­guage of the port to which the con­sign­ment is being sent (usu­ally French or Dutch) plus that of the coun­try where the con­sign­ment will end up (Ger­man, Ital­ian, Lat­vian…). If any of the pa­per­work is miss­ing, goods are par­tially or com­pletely un­loaded at the port of entry. Each EHC costs €230, which is why the cost of ex­port­ing to the EU has gone up be­tween 60% and 100%. Ac­cord­ing to Do­minic Goudie, head of the in­ter­na­tional de­part­ment of Britain’s Food and Drink Fed­er­a­tion, sales to the EU have dropped by 2 bil­lion pounds ster­ling, on top of which the loss of around 100,000 Eu­ro­pean lorry dri­vers and count­less EU sea­sonal work­ers - Bul­gar­i­ans just don’t think pick­ing Eng­lish straw­ber­ries is worth the bu­reau­cratic bother they now have to go through first - is be­gin­ning to leave gaps on su­per­mar­ket shelves, not least be­cause food im­ports from the EU are also down by around 18%, a fig­ure which will rise when the UK in­tro­duces its own health in­spec­tions in its ports on the first day of 2022. With the re­sult that many com­pa­nies - not just food pro­duc­ers - are mov­ing their op­er­a­tions to the EU, caus­ing an in­creas­ing loss of British jobs. And here in Cat­alo­nia, we UK pass­port hold­ers will have to deal with yet more of that red tape which the Daily Tele­graph as­sured us would van­ish into thin air with one wave of the Brexit wand: the Span­ish gov­ern­ment has cre­ated a brand new res­i­dents’ card - the TIE (Tar­jeta de Iden­ti­tad Ex­tran­jero) - just for us! And what fun we’ll have col­lect­ing all the nec­es­sary doc­u­men­ta­tion re­quired and then queu­ing for an im­pos­si­ble-to-cal­cu­late pe­riod of time in a po­lice sta­tion to get that card pressed into our lit­tle non-Eu­ro­pean hands.

The Irish Times colum­nist Fin­tan O’Toole has pointed out in a re­cent ar­ti­cle that Brexit, when all is said and done, is a clas­sic case of ‘imag­i­nary re­venge’ (a term coined by Ni­et­zsche, ap­par­ently): when peo­ple feel dis­em­pow­ered - and who doesn’t these days? - they can be eas­ily fooled into be­liev­ing they have a long-stand­ing enemy on whom they can suc­cess­fully wreak re­venge. The ad­vo­cates of Brexit cre­ated an en­tirely fic­ti­tious or at least grossly ex­ag­ger­ated image of a bu­reau­crat­i­cally chal­lenged, money-grub­bing, sov­er­eignty-de­spis­ing EU, and laid all imag­in­able (and often imag­ined) evils at its door. This fan­tasy failed to dupe the North­ern Irish, the Welsh, the Scot­tish and the Lon­don­ers, but did man­age to bam­boo­zle what O’Toole calls ‘the rest of Eng­land’. How­ever, the real prob­lem with imag­i­nary re­venge, he points out, is that, being phan­tas­magor­i­cal, it can never be sat­is­fied, and there­fore con­tin­ues to gen­er­ate prob­lem after prob­lem. And not a day goes by when that has not been the case since Brexit ‘got done’, to para­phrase Boris John­son’s favourite slo­gan. (Mean­while the British es­tab­lish­ment - a real enemy, if you like - is still call­ing the exact same shots that it’s been fir­ing ever since Green­wich Mean Time began). In a re­cent par­lia­men­tary re­port, an ex­ec­u­tive from the British Meat Proces­sors’ As­so­ci­a­tion said that it ‘feels as though we have stepped back into the 1950s’. Not quite: back then, re­mem­ber, we used to have an em­pire.