www.ft.com/content/56ea8a4c-23ad-4e7f-8aa7-cb2543e1d15e
Standard Brexitteer deflection ploy ......."but Jeremy Corbyn" - move on as you like to say 😁
But like it or not, Brexit has crimped the freedom of holidaymakers too. As we saw last month when Dover and Folkestone ground to a halt as they tried to absorb the annual exodus of British families off to camp in Brittany or the Dordogne, travel to Europe is harder now.
The Trade and Cooperation Agreement allows for “visa-free” travel for UK citizens for 90 days in any 180-day period, but regulating that access creates additional hassle — and there are more hassles to come next year.
So on one level, the denials from leading Brexiters that the delays had nothing to do with Brexit were comical — according to calculations by Dover port it now takes 90 seconds per car to stamp passports, compared with 58 seconds before Brexit. That’s an increase of more than 50 per cent. Go figure.
But on another level, the Brexiters had an unwitting point — which was that Dover has always been a fragile bottleneck and, when the French deigned to fully staff Dover’s customs booths, actually the system just about worked. And it has since.
The real takeaway here, which seems to be lost on some of the Brexit fraternity, is that now the UK no longer has free-movement rights, it is actually more dependent on European goodwill for smooth border crossing than in the past.
As Katy Hayward and Tony Smith wrote this week for UK in a Changing Europe: “Although it may seem counter-intuitive, ‘taking back control of borders’ is necessarily an exercise in collaboration. Without that, the queues will only grow.”
And so it has proved. A source at Dover tells me that, since the great July dust-up, when the port formally accused the Police aux Frontières (PAF) of “woefully inadequate” staffing, the French couldn’t have been more amenable.
They’ve been opening more booths when asked, shifting staff quickly between lorries and cars according to traffic fluctuations and generally being all-round efficient. “All we could ask for,” says my man on the White Cliffs.
But what the July foul-up showed was just how quickly that co-operation can end, and the consequences when it does. And this cuts both ways.
In a couple of weeks the flows will reverse, and all those UK holidaymakers will be in Calais at the mercy of the UK Border Force staffing levels, waiting to get home.
During the July crisis Jean-Marc Puissesseau, president of the ports of Calais and Boulogne, complained to my colleagues in France that his port was being “held hostage” by the failure of the UK authorities to send enough staff.
“There are not enough UK police on Calais side either, and I’ve been warning about this for several months,” he said. “We need 50 per cent more people to ensure the smooth functioning of the port.” Touché.
I asked the UK Home Office to respond to this and it declined to engage with Puissesseau’s complaint, but given the reciprocal nature of borders noted above, it would be prudent of the UK side to ensure sufficient staffing in Calais later this month.
Because crossing EU borders is going to get harder, not easier in the years to come when the EU introduces its ETIAS visa-waiver system (now delayed to November 2023) and an even more painful Entry/Exit System that will require biometric checks (fingerprint or iris scans) at the border.
At the moment both Dover and Folkestone are clear there is no workable solution to implementing those biometric checks in a port setting that doesn’t involve people getting out of cars (not safe) or hugely increasing that new 90-second processing time (not practical, as we saw).
The truly bonkers part is that the EU and UK systems that capture this (identical) biometric data are legally and technically separate. EU law requires that the data are captured under the direct supervision of an EU border official, and the capture of the data must be done at the border. The expectation at the UK ports is that the implementation of the system will need to be delayed again.
Logically, you’d think there needs to be some form of a political-level agreement that takes a much more risk-based approach to managing the Short Straits.
In a world of mutual trust and goodwill (don’t laugh) it’s hard to argue that the crocodiles of family Volvos and Ford people-carriers heading for Dover present a significant security risk when illegal boat crossings are running at 700 people a day.
But designing mutually workable solutions is going to require real co-operation between the UK and the EU, which, to put it mildly, has not been the tenor of the campaigns of Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak as they promise a showdown with Brussels over Northern Ireland.
There is a belief in Tory Brexiter circles that relations with the EU can be siloed. That might be true for Ukraine, but in a host of other areas, whether science collaboration under Horizon Europe, or indeed border management, that’s a very naive position.