Brexit talks are as bad as pandemic response, here’s why – William Wallace

That matters to anyone who eats fresh fruit and vegetables imported from France and Spain, works for a company that exports to the continent, travels abroad or is at risk from cross-border crime.

Boris Johnson promised last year he had prepared “an oven-ready Brexit”.

That promise was as empty as his recent assurance that we would have a world-beating 
test-and-trace system suppressing coronavirus before the beginning of June.

The Vote Leave campaign promised in their winning referendum campaign, over three years ago, that negotiating a trade agreement with the EU as we left would be easy and straightforward.

Since then disagreements within the Conservative Party forced Theresa May into a succession of ambiguous positions, now resolved by expelling several leading Conservatives and installing the leadership of the Vote Leave campaign in Downing Street.

However Boris Johnson is famously not a man who reads the details of the papers submitted to him; that makes it easier for him to promise that we can have a deal agreed by the end of July – in less than six weeks from now.

It’s not impossible that an outline agreement could be pencilled in over the summer but that would leave the details of future relations to be sorted out later, with British businesses uninformed about the tax and regulatory framework they will face in their largest overseas market.

Dominic Raab’s admission last year that he had not realised how important the port of Dover was to UK trade illustrates how slow ministers have been to understand the realities of leaving.

The Government has admitted we won’t be ready to manage border controls at Channel ports by next January and will have to let trucks through.

At this very late stage, staff are still being recruited and haven’t yet been trained.

French, Belgian and Dutch customs are better prepared and may not be so willing to wave trucks and cars through unless clear rules have been agreed.

The Irish Sea border and that within Ireland present further unresolved challenges, evident when the referendum took place in 2016 but denied by Johnson and others.

Many in Brussels remember Boris Johnson as the Telegraph correspondent who invented stories about EU regulations on straight bananas and square tomatoes – funny but untrue.

When he promises us that we will negotiate an agreement on the Australian model, EU negotiators trust him no more now than then.

There is no Australian model to follow: Australia is still negotiating a Free Trade Agreement with the EU.

The hope and assumption of the Vote Leave campaign was that Britain’s international links would move away from dependence on Europe to closer engagement with the English-speaking countries and the rising powers of Asia – above all, China.

Three years later, Conservative MPs are demanding the Government adopts a more hostile approach to China, taking the American side in a series of disputes that make the Chinese market an unwelcoming destination for UK exports.

Negotiations on a future trade agreement with the USA look likely to accept US regulations on food safety, taxation of multi-nationals and data protection as necessary compromises in order to access US markets: accepting dependence on US rules when we have rejected the EU rules we took part in designing.

UK sovereignty is compromised more directly by US bases in Britain, including in Yorkshire, whose operations and staffing are entirely unaccountable to the UK Parliament.

I heard about the rapid increase in US intelligence personnel at Menwith Hill after the 9/11 attacks from gossip in Harrogate.

No minister informed the Commons, nor briefed opposition parties.

This Government has handled negotiations about the UK’s future relationship with the EU no better than it has managed Covid-19: breezy assurances that everything would be fine and that only gloomsters and experts are talking Britain down.

The danger is we will end up with doubled damage to our economy and discover we have exchanged membership of the EU for unhappy dependence on the USA.

Lord Wallace of Saltaire is a Lib Dem peer and former Government minister.

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