We need to talk about Brexit | FT Film

There is still an element of uncertainty in many agricultural businesses. In fact, knowing where we are going next on this journey is really important. Brexit remains a very divisive issue. He divided us. I voted to leave. I didn't think it would be like this. Naively this is difficult, what I would really like to hear is how we can align ourselves more closely with our closest trading partners, which raises a lot of questions for us about sovereignty, which is of course what Brexit is about . The political incentive to

talk

about Brexit is zero. What we

need

to

talk

about is economic growth rather than Brexit, Brexit and providing the opportunities of Brexit is a key part of achieving that economic growth.

Mr. President, I love this SL behind this, we are going to a general election year in which he barely appears. the political agenda our politicians and our business people

need

to have a sensible and adult conversation about the challenges and what we are going to do about them and the year was a good time to do it because I am the fourth generation to farm here my family originally came to Sor from Devon in 1897 back in 2016 I accepted that Brussels was not perfect the commissioner was not perfect the decision-making process was not perfect when we faced Brexit we faced a possible cut in the amount of support we were receiving through politics common agricultural through the UK government, some would say it focuses the mind more on productivity and indeed running a business, others would say it leaves us potentially at greater risk of having the security blanket removed from all of us of subsidies from the common agricultural policy.

What we know at the moment is that the budget is set for the life of this Parliament and as we stand here today we have no idea how long that parliament is going to last. I think we need to talk about Brexit in terms of what the next phase will be in terms of the trade deal. We know that we export our agricultural products out of the UK, the vast majority of them still go to peer companies in Europe, we just have to moving forward with an open mind, doing as much trade as we can, cooperating as much as we can and learning from each other is as simple as that don't waste your work don't waste your children's future my name is richel wolf I was an advisor to David Cameron during the original referendum on

brexit

this country wants to move forward as was one of the authors of the conservative party manifesto in the 2019 elections from the public's point of view there is no desire to talk about

brexit

and that is why no politician wants to talk about it brexit the get-out-vote slogan, of course, was Take Back Control: we now have a trade deal with the EU that is tariff-free.

We have regained control of our money. Control of our laws and legislative powers. We have delivered on what we said we would do in 2016. The barriers that were erected. by the trade deal that Lord Frost and Boris Johnson signed with the EU have not fundamentally changed in the three years since the trade deal came into force and those barriers still persist to this day. I think after Brexit we missed an opportunity to look forward. Britain's place in the world, you know what our drivers for economic growth will be, how can we focus on certain areas that we are particularly good at and how can we ensure that we have the appropriate regulatory fiscal general fiscal policy framework?

For those areas to make the most of those opportunities, the Brexit deal that we ultimately ended up signing has impacted different parts of the economy in different ways. It is very difficult for agriculture. It is very difficult for the creative industries. It is very difficult for some parts of the manufacturing industry. My name is Dave Seaward. I am one of the founders of 3p Innovation. We carry out custom automation mainly for the pharmaceutical industries. We have lost approximately half of our growth as a direct result of Brexit. We had a huge market at our doors, which was the European Union and us.

We could trade as if it were our local market. 60% of companies tell us that it is more difficult now than the year before Brexit. It hasn't really helped their businesses in any way. 50% say the rules have changed, but they have also continued to change. We would like to see real consistency from Clarity. Well, all that dinosaurs were formed in 2005. We could see a niche online selling dinosaurs and prehistoric animal models. When we left the European Union, we no longer had responsibility for the C brand. There would be ukca. mark products that could be sold in the UK and if you wanted to sell products in the European Union you would have to have the C mark for those items and then on the first of August last year they removed that so it was a big effort. of money and a lot of wasted time so I am based in the UK and am forced to set up an office in Europe to effectively get myself a postcode so I can put a c mark on a machine so I can't sell it. only to Europe but to the rest of the world because those multinational clients, man C Mar, because they understand that it means that our machinery is safe.

One of the ways the UK and Europe have diverged is VAT harmonisation, but because we are outside of Europe, in a third country, we have to do our VAT through another company in Ireland because only one company in the EU can do EU VAT, so it is extra work if you export to EU, you have to pay to have a representative in each country. Exporting to certain companies should not necessarily be the case and in fact we know that works because Norway currently has that agreement with the EU, so we would like to see that happen.

Brexit is not a single event, it is a process. Divergence in regulations. Marks continue with new export opportunities KY Bok says it is false to say that Brexit has had a big impact on EU trade in the UK. Sunak claims that the freedoms he enjoys as a result of Brexit make the UK more competitive. British businesses will go crazy when they hear Richy Sunak. The Prime Minister said that one of the reasons why the British economy has not contracted as many people predicted in 23 was because of Brexit. British businesses have adapted to the new trading relationship as expected, but it is still far from optimal, it has made us farm harder.

In fact, we are now producing more on this farm than we have ever produced. In a way, we have adapted and adapted a lot of the machinery that we use on farms in the UK and it is made in Europe, and the parts come from Europe, and whereas before we could pick up the phone or send an email and 24 hours later it would land through no fault of those parts suppliers due to different customs regime and border friction, suddenly you have to think that you know days in advance or you are waiting for the spare part, the machine is broken for days a week for it to land now we have to deal with German rules, Italian rules, Spanish rules, some of these nations actually have district rules and you're trying to figure out if I want to send a field service person to Munich.

It's the same as sending someone to Madrid. If I send someone to Madrid, it's actually the same as Barcelona. You have to have different documents in place and it's all friction. What I would really like to hear is how we can align more closely with our closest trading partners. So far border frictions have been just one of the ways they have gone from Britain to the EU. This is the year 3 years after we left the EU. correctly that we are going to introduce our own border controls on goods coming from the EU to the UK and if today there are particularly important practices in the just-in-time supply chain, we need to be absolutely sure that bureaucracy is not going to get By the way, if you are a small business that imports, there is a real concern that your trading partners in the EU will basically think you are not worth the effort and sell your products elsewhere, if you are a large business that is a minor concern, but what worries you is when your stories cross the border, if you are stuck behind someone who doesn't have the proper documentation, if the new import regulations don't work smoothly and there are delays at the border, that will add time . costs and that will undoubtedly generate upward pressure on inflation.

The whole point of Brexit was to take back control. Conservative Brexits would differ from where perhaps the Labor Brexit is their job. The point is that once you have left the EU, then it is up to the British people to elect a government that reflects their own priorities and that government can then implement the Brexit vision if they wish, want to rejoin the single market and the Union. of clients, I would say, off the agenda at the moment, but that doesn't mean we can. To make matters better if you take an analogy with divorce, the two partners stopped throwing plates at each other and now talk in a slightly cold manner about how to resolve some of the things that needed to be resolved and Ry soon headed in their favor over the north. from Iran.

The trade dispute was resolved. The Horizon Scientific Programme, into which Britain has now also been readmitted, the government scrapped the proposal to have a bonfire of EU regulation with all rules expiring automatically, something that was driving businesses crazy because of the uncertainty that was going to arise. If more flexible, pragmatic things emerge that we can implement, the first thing you could do is start aligning in several key sectors of the economy that are important to our goods manufacturers. Now the important thing to remember is that the alignment does not To gain access, even if you have the same rules, you still have to show up at the border with a piece of paper proving that you followed the rules, and that is the cost and friction that does It might be harder to put the UK in your supply chain if we are an EU business, but you could still do that alignment unilaterally just on the UK side and that would make things easier for businesses.

I think it's very difficult for Conservatives to say that the UK would simply remain aligned with the evolving rules being drawn up. by the EU I think it makes sense for workers to at least talk to the blue chip banks privately that they want to remove ideology from some of these issues, they want to make pragmatic decisions about when to diverge and when to stay aligned, and I think they think that They have a little more wiggle room to do that. What we would say to the next Prime Minister is probably question number one: the veterinary food and drink agreement.

Reduce the number of controls necessary on food products. and animal products crossing the border in some of the areas most affected by delays New Zealand's veter agreement simply reduces the frequency of border checks Swiss agreement reduces the need for checks that is the deepest That would do much more easy for our supermarkets and our merchants to trade with Europe. The challenge is that it will require high levels of rule adoption and essentially having no say at the table that sets the rules. It would be quite foolish as a nation to suddenly change. our rule book and scrap, for example, our lamb export trade, so you just have to accept it.

I think it's inevitable that maybe you should consider something like the Swiss model and we're going to have to align our regulations and the idea that, oh yeah, they're going to become rule takers, well, it's about give and take, right? Does it try to give away sovereignty to reduce border frictions? It is an extraordinary nation, it is not an approach adopted by the major countries of the world let alone a G7 country, so why are we thinking about this extraordinary one? a kind of cowardly method. I simply think it represents a failure to analyze the opportunities for the UK.

The idea of ​​a total divergence of our trade policy from our European colleagues is a complete myth. They are our biggest export customer for what we produce here. It would be crazy to tear up the rule book, why would we want to be in a race to the bottom to compete against them on standards that we absolutely need to defend the standards that we have here, the environmental standards, the animal welfare standards, we have some of the highest in the world and the people who want to buy that product in the office recognize that that is why they buy the product from us.

What you are seeing now is that the EU is creating its carbon tax, which means that when you import something into the EU you have to show how much embedded carbon is in that item so as not to undermine the Green Drive in Europe, there was a toy manufacturer who had pieces of steel in their toys, now they have to fill out paperwork to say how manyThere are emissions in that steel. I mean, they don't even understand what that means, never mind how to do it. The UK could decide that it will legally synchronize its carbon markets and carbon border taxes with the EU.

I don't think the public will be up in arms because we have joined the EU carbon trading framework. We could do a youth mobility deal so that 18-13 year olds can come and work, say for 2 or 3 years in the UK and vice versa. Students want to be able to do exchanges. Obviously, the United Kingdom is no longer part of the Arasmus plan. It has its own alternative. There have been claims that it doesn't work as well. They could make a professional mobility agreement to facilitate our professionals coming to work in each other's companies. We would like to see mutual recognition of qualifications and greater flexibility in how long people can stay in different countries within the limits of staying outside the single market and outside the Customs Union.

Only so far can changes be made, frankly, it amounts to tinkering with the margins of the agreement we currently have ugv which maintains a tracker of the most important issues for the public also looks at it by party and shows that for conservative voters immigration was the issue number one immigration is something people associate Brexit with, good morning that's a problem for Rishi Sunak when there are still 29,000 people who arrived in small boats last year and of course a legal network.immigration in record numbers when political scientists analyze why people voted to leave the EU, voters mainly thought it would have a positive effect on the economy, help the UK control immigration and they also thought it would improve the UK's ability to govern ours.

Foreign Affairs to return control to the UK, although pro-Leave voters recognize that the impact on the economy has not been positive and that, in fact, immigration has not been controlled at all, they are still attached to the idea of for Britain to govern its own affairs when On the issue of migration, of course, we took back control and since we left the EU, governments had control over that policy area, so they really need to be held to account for their performance in that area. There is a review process created. in the trade and corporate deal signed by Boris Johnson which will come into force at the end of 2025.

K Dharma has said he would like to use the review, in fact, to start a small renegotiation of the terms, it is really questionable how much substance there would be, it is a Review is not a renegotiation, but it would signal a direction of travel if it destroyed the chances of closer alignment. There are many in Brussels who say: look, we are looking at this as a kind of brief technical exercise to solve the problems, not as a fundamental issue. renegotiation of an issue that you know we generally consider resolved, one of the things that most irritated the European Union, it is fair to say, was the idea that Britain was trying to cherry-pick and trying to take all the advantages of being a member of the EU without what the electorate saw as disadvantages, for example the free movement of people, the only way someone like K lady could talk about Brexit more honestly is if they were also willing to say they were going to do something really very substantial about it, it's not much. offered in terms of minor adjustments or renegotiating the deal completely bespoke, to do anything serious about it would be to massively re-enter the EU in some form and he is not willing to do that because he does not want to divide his electorate, Brexit per se is very out of voters' top priority list the economy Miles Ahead is the most important issue followed by the Health Service the state of the Health Service followed by migration and you could say that Brexit influences all of those things, but the The public does not necessarily make a link, for example, between Britain's slow economic performance and Brexit because they are not being invited by politicians, it is not part of daily political discourse and therefore the topic has fallen considerably from the political agenda as we begin this election year. with an average of 18 points ahead of the Conservatives, it seems the most likely scenario at the moment is for Kiss Sta to head to Downing Street.

What an incoming Labor government would do is make Brexit work, make Brexit work, is one way of trying to argue. to the voters we will not reopen this can of worms that divided the country kiss lady and work. To begin with, they have to tread a very careful line, they always call it the Tory Brexit, they try to point out some of the ways in which it is not working well. As for the Conservatives, all the main political parties, with the exception of the Scottish National Party, do not want to talk about Brexit. To begin with, everyone knows that the country has gone through a psychodrama that they do not want to revisit.

It divides. For both parties it is not a simple partisan issue. If they started raising the issues, someone would obviously come and ask them: what are you going to do about it? Labour's general strategy, which is to say nothing about nothing, is working well for them. Because? Mess with it, no need to take risks. The polls say he's going to win anyway. More and more people have what we call Briget. There's some partial regret here and you saw that graph showing those who think it was a good idea. thought it was a bad idea has spread people don't think Brexit is going well overall and that's true for remain voters in the EU who never thought it was going well, but it's also true for leading voters, just one in five think that Brexit is going well, but they don't want to reopen this, let's do Brexit, my friends, and let's continue with our project, the reason why achieving Brexit was the motto in 2019, not making Brexit work , people mostly just wanted to stop talking about it, we asked them both.

Kia starma and Rishi sunak if they wanted to appear in this video and they both rejected it, the worst thing that could happen to this country is that those in power do not have an open discussion about the new way of working with Europe if we want to grow. our business and make money and therefore pay more taxes to help everyone else, we need people to understand that the European Union is still a very important trading partner for us, it is clearly hurting business and business drives our economy, everyone wants growth, but I'm not sure if the government or the future government in Hue is saying anything that says they want Brexit to work, it needs to be talked about to give confidence to the rest of the world and Europe that We can continue to trade with business.

Brexit is the Elephant in the Room Even the most committed Brexiteer would find it quite difficult to say that it has worked, as we promised that we were going to be a global Britain, find huge opportunities in the rest of the world, liberalize our economy everywhere kind of wonderful ways that will unleash dynamism and entrepreneurship and innovation Singapore in times of a cloak and dagger nation really divorced from our partners in the European Union The example of Singapore is relevant, we can see those advantages if we support it and act quickly on some of the People who campaigned for Brexit wanted to move to a freer trade, more deregulated, lower tax economy and they got nothing of what they wanted.

The speech to the voters was: we will reduce migration, we will have more money for public services and they will have more control, the public will not. I want Singapore on temporary posts Bry Sunak would say that there are benefits that Britain can and will exploit by being outside the European Union. There is a good story that the British government has to tell about the development of the technology sector and the life sciences sector in the United Kingdom and if Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, was here or Sun was here, they would tell him that we should put an end to this narrative of declinism and that Brexit has some advantages: the ability to set its own rules which would also include free ports.

We became successful members of the organization for the transpacific partnership. We have a deal with Australia and New Zealand and unfortunately in trade deals, the really big ones, us and China, are out of their reach. It seems that the government is making good progress. The India trade deal as far as we are concerned, the government has made some progress in terms of having individual trade deals with individual US states and these should not be sniffed at with this conversation about some sort of trade deal with California if you are an investor. and you're looking at the UK on a 7 to 20e horizon, what you see is regulatory uncertainty, a function.

I think of the British state trying to find its feet after having lost the regulatory barriers that come with being a member of the European Union, where Whether we like it or not, many regulations in many areas of commercial life emerged from Brussels and we enacted them as the law of the United Kingdom. Those barriers have disappeared. We have regained control, but regaining control creates uncertainty and business does not. It's not like farming is uncertain, it's a long-term business, it's not something you do month by month, it's something you plan years in advance in the UK, now after CAPAP and in the EU, we have our own system, but remember that farming in the UK is a devolved matter there.

There is still an element of uncertainty in many agricultural businesses when it comes to support, but in those decentralized nations it is a hugely uncertain time for those producers to really work out what they are going to grow and what they are going to be. We need our politicians to come and be business, to come and talk to businesses about how we can solve the challenges that Brexit has thrown at us. Obviously we are particularly good in Services, particularly good in Life Sciences, we have a large technology sector within the UK, obviously we have a large financial services sector within the UK.

I think it's worth looking at all of those areas one by one and determining what else can be done in those areas to ensure that they are the most attractive destination possible for those sectors. Economically, if we look at the volumes, we will see that in many areas the volumes have not recovered and it would be expected that this would be the case if we had not left the EU to continue growing, so if we look at the UK's exports to Germany and German imports from the United Kingdom and then compare them with Germany's trade relations with the rest of Europe.

You'll see the UK slide down the list of Germany's trading partners. We want? We want? People want politics to calm down. They don't want division and toxicity. that divided the IC political parties divided the country divided the families I voted to leave I probably regret the way it turned out I didn't think it would be naively so difficult so much bureaucracy when there was supposed to be less of it If there was another referendum tomorrow , I would seriously consider whether to vote the same as last time. Well, I voted to remain. I understand why a lot of other people voted the other way and it's great to have deals with Australia that are really good for There are a lot of companies I'm sure but for us the dinosaur model inside the box is often worth less than the costs of shipment to take it to Australia, it is simply too geographically far away for us to really benefit from the Johnson government was desperate for a trade deal or two trade deals went too far, so the deals with Australia and New Zealand were literally pushed back even though our trade with Australia, as much as we love our Australian cousins, is next to nothing, we are totally exposed there.

I think the biggest of all potential threats to UK agriculture at the moment is the way New Zealand and Australia's trade deals are set up and the potential access they have to our Market K starm has made it clear that they don't wants to return to the single market that is He also said that he does not want Britain to leave the European Union, he does not want Britain to undermine the EU on labor standards, environmental standards, food standards, so there is a big call so that it makes the public might get a little irritated if he leaves.

He goes back to Brussels and negotiates something he hadn't talked about in detail in an election campaign but, frankly, British politics is full of people who do things they never really promised to do, don't forget that when Blair and Brown arrived they didn't give much thought either. detailed promises and some of the most important things they ended up doing, such as making the Bank of England independent, they didn't talk at all about what I would like both the government and the opposition parties to talk more about.head of general action. Has your growth plan given power back to the UK?

It is now up to the UK government or the government after the general election to determine where else they would like our sovereign country to deal with other countries if we are talking about carbon trading. Degree to which food standards are aligned I think the public neither knows nor cares at all, so I think it will be very easy to align with certain standards in the EU. I don't think we should be naive in saying that we can do many things. in stealth ways that completely remove trade-offs and fundamental questions about Brexit Brexit is just one of the many things they don't want to talk about What are they going to do with education What are they going to do with the health service How are they?

Are they going to fund social care? Will they be able to build many more houses? Where are we going to have to increase taxes? Where they don't want to talk about any of this? We don't want to discuss the most important problems facing the country. In the country, in the year of the elections, no one wants to talk about them, which is quite disturbing if you want to believe in democracy.