We cannot ignore the warning signs: the UK faces a more insular future

A variant of the Covid virus managed to do what months of ham-handed British negotiations with Brussels could not. It cut the UK off, for all practical purposes, not just from the whole of continental Europe, but from much of the wider world. Within hours of the prime minister, Boris Johnson, announcing that the scientific advice gave him no choice but to quarantine the whole of the southeast of England, first France, then almost everyone else, got the message.  

Flights, trains and ships were halted. Continental lorries were unable to cross back to France, the Netherlands or Belgium. UK ministers said, more or less cheerfully, that lorries were still able to enter this country – but how, with most exits blocked, would they then get home for Christmas? Ministers – ministers, not supermarkets – raised the spectre of food shortages.  

Needless to say this is about as far from “Global Britain” – shorthand for the Johnson government’s post-Brexit ambitions – as it is possible to be. The idea was that the UK would relish breaking out of what passes for the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy. We could trade with the world on our own terms; our ships would be free to roam the seas, we could restore our imperial (sorry, Commonwealth) links where we left off.  

Now, it would be fair to say that the country’s nigh-total isolation will not last forever. Indeed, it is being relaxed a little even as I write, with near-instant Covid tests being introduced to allow commercial drivers, if not individual visitors, to come and go. And while the lorry parks in Kent look forbidding, much freight is transported unaccompanied by drivers, so the risk of shortages may have been exaggerated.  

Still, it is hard not to suppress a wry smile when ministers insist that, of course, it could all have been a lot worse, had contingencies not been rehearsed for just such a scenario – even if that scenario was a no-deal Brexit, rather than a virus running amok in Kent. It is, after all, just two years since the then Brexit Secretary, Dominic Raab, admitted that he had not quite appreciated how reliant the UK was on the Dover-Calais crossing. Now foreign secretary, Raab may now find himself trying to smooth European feathers ruffled by not being informed of a serious health risk out of control across the Channel.  

Ministers are not completely wrong, though, when they cite the preparations for a no-deal Brexit as having helped in the current Covid situation – if not exactly in the way they mean. In fact, the help goes both ways. For while a popular British view is that France, in particular, deliberately overreacted to the variant of the virus in order to warn the UK of the consequences of a no-deal Brexit, the speed and completeness with which the UK was effectively cut off will also serve to disguise, for a while at least, some of the real, longer-term, effects of Brexit in separating the UK from its closest neighbours. Thanks to the halt to traffic because of Covid, the break resulting from Brexit may initially seem less sharp and less significant than it really is.  

There is much pride and distinctiveness about being an island, or a group of islands. All islands sense that. And there are advantages – greater before air travel, but still not to be dismissed – in being a natural way-stop for travellers and traders. But the opposite is also true. Islands can become inconvenient, irrelevant and find themselves being passed by. And when Brexit is fully “done”, the UK will gradually wake up to the fact that it is, and increasingly will become, a very different country from the one that it was before 2016.  

Some of the signs were already there well before Covid struck. Have you noticed how the prefix “Euro-” has almost vanished from brand names, from the sides of vans, and from supermarket produce? The moment you cross the Channel – a prospect that at present, alas, seems remote – everything is “Euro-” this or that. You find little Union flags increasingly embellishing the food content labelling. A couple of weeks ago, I bought something described as “British chicken kiev”. Just so you didn’t get the wrong idea about having come all the way across Europe from Ukraine?  

There are also much bigger signs of change. Last month, two major ferry companies, Stena and Irish Ferries, announced new daily sailings between France and the Republic of Ireland, the purpose being to bypass likely congestion on routes to and from the UK. There were already a few direct sailings, but now there will be many more.  

Much was made, following the latest clarification about procedures for British trade with Northern Ireland, of the need to ensure that Northern Ireland consumers keep getting the British products they know and love. Increasingly, though, more goods from the Republic and the rest of the EU could start to arrive north of the border, and the simplicity of that trade, compared with the formalities that could be faced by freight from across the Irish Sea, could make those goods cheaper and fresher – and then, who knows, but consumers could acquire a taste for it.

It is also worth noting that a big factor in EU concerns about keeping an open Irish border was that there should not be a backdoor into the EU for goods that do not meet EU sanitary standards. How much larger will such considerations loom in the wake of the pandemic?  

But it is not only our flagging of UK-produced goods or the bypassing of UK ports. It has been possible to sense from London, especially over the past year, how the EU is perceptibly receding. “We” are increasingly trying to deal – not always successfully, as Johnson again discovered recently – with the European “big boys”, rather than the EU as a whole.  

We favour something called the E3 (France, Germany and the UK) as a group that could get things done. We would rather like a D10 – D for democracy, that is – to which we would invite South Korea, Australia and India. This, and a desire to send a clear signal of distancing from China, may be why Johnson plans a trip to Delhi in the new year.  

How far the UK will be in a position to capitalise on its supposedly regained freedom of manoeuvre, however, is another matter. India will probably want some tangible quid pro quo, in terms of UK visas, beyond an invitation to the D10. Israel’s new ambassador to the UK wants us to follow the US in moving our embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Will that be the price of a trade deal? The US under President Biden may be a more benign and predictable presence, but might it be more interested in the clout that resides in Brussels than the shell of a “special relationship”?  

We shall see where, if anywhere, all this leads. So far, any changes are no more than faint and disparate signals. But they are more than just straws in the wind. They are harbingers of the UK’s more insular future. And they will still be there, and still growing, when the pandemic stops.