January may have been a one-off Brexit dip, but EU trade will stay below ‘normal’

The British people seem to understand the effects of Brexit better than their government. An exclusive opinion poll by Savanta ComRes for The Independent has found that twice as many people say leaving the European Union has been bad for trade as say it has been good.

That does not mean, of course, that the voters want to reverse Brexit. Our poll also found that, in a somewhat hypothetical referendum on rejoining the EU, people would vote by 54 per cent to 46 per cent to stay out.

But it does suggest that the British people are well aware that Brexit comes at a price – a reality that ministers are determined to deny. After Friday’s official statistics showing a 41 per cent fall in sales to the EU in January, Lord Frost, Boris Johnson’s new cabinet minister responsible for relations with the EU, said: “The latest information indicates that overall freight volumes between the UK and the EU have been back to their normal levels for over a month now, that is, since the start of February.”

This was contradicted by Richard Burnett, chief executive of the Road Haulage Association, who said that 50 per cent of lorries were returning to the UK empty instead of the normal 30 per cent. Other industry representatives said that there are “fundamental problems” with the new trade rules, and that the barriers to trade are “real and costly”.

This should be obvious to anyone who does not have a party-political interest in denying it. For this government, the point of Brexit is that the UK is outside the EU single market and customs union. That means there have to be checks on goods coming into the EU as there would be from any other country. Lord Frost did his best to minimise those bureaucratic burdens, and he secured a zero-tariff deal that means there are no direct costs to trade with the UK, but the non-tariff barriers remain.

Of course, the figures for January were unusually bad, and that was partly the result of traders biding their time to see how the new rules shake out. But to claim that trade has now returned to “normal” simply defies credibility. As long as we remain outside the single market and customs union, trade will be more difficult – and in some cases such as shellfish and seed potatoes, no longer possible.

Nor is it the case that the passage of time will improve matters. On the contrary, many of the Brexit trade rules have not come into effect yet, and the government has now postponed the full implementation of them until at least October. Meanwhile, the situation in Northern Ireland is becoming more difficult – hence, no doubt, the prime minister’s visit to Belfast on Friday.

If Mr Johnson has indeed appointed Lord Frost because he will take a more “robust” approach to dealings with the EU, this seems a bad idea. Lecturing EU leaders on how they should “shake off any remaining ill will towards us for leaving”, as Lord Frost did last weekend, seems likely to be counterproductive.

It is bad enough that we have knowingly increased the cost of trade with the EU, but it is worse that, instead of trying to minimise the damage, Mr Johnson and Lord Frost seem determined simultaneously to deny economic reality and to make the damage worse by antagonising the leaders of our most important export market.