Defining effectiveness

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For most countries, “controlling the borders” is about who and what comes in rather than who or what goes out. There are exceptions, of course – people trying to leave the former East Germany were often shot, and leaving North Korea is not exactly a simple proposition. But the more general case is about inward movement rather than outward movement. The proponents of Brexit always saw it as about stopping the ’wrong’ foreigners coming into the UK; many of them seem to have been genuinely surprised that removing freedom of movement would affect UK citizens travelling to Europe. After all, it’s ‘obvious’ why the UK would want to keep out foreigners, but it’s equally ‘obvious’ that no sensible country would want to keep out Britons. Those foreigners just don’t understand that there is a huge difference between migrants (people coming into the UK) and ex-pats (people going from the UK to another country). So queues at the border for entry into the UK are expected, whilst queues to enter France are nothing to do with Brexit but, as the PM’s spokesperson put it, are because French border officials are “inspecting and stamping every single passport”, as though that were an arbitrary decision taken by the French entirely independently of the UK government’s demand to be treated as a third party country.

When it comes to goods, the controls implemented by the UK to date fall a long way short of those it is obliged to implement as a result of the Brexit agreement. In theory, of course, the UK could simply decide not to implement any controls at all; indeed, that is the logic of some Brexiteers. There are consequences of doing that, though; world trade rules would require that if the absence of controls between the UK and the EU is the result of unilateral UK action rather than a specific trade agreement, those controls could not be imposed on goods from any other country either. The conflict that causes, coupled with the exceptionalism which still can’t quite accept that the EU would not give the UK the same free access as it had while a member, means that the UK has repeatedly postponed the implementation of border checks on goods coming from the EU. Instead, the government is struggling to find a way of claiming that it is applying the checks it is obligated to apply whilst doing as little as possible to actually apply them.

This, according to the Cabinet Office, will mean that the UK has “the world’s most effective border”. Whether that’s true or not hinges on how the word ‘effective’ is being defined. If it’s defined in terms of ensuring a free flow of goods and people, then yes, it could indeed turn out to be highly effective. But if it’s defined in terms of preventing smuggling, breaches of standards, and unfair competition, then what they are trying to put in place actually looks more like the world’s most ineffective border. I suppose that having the freedom to open borders counts, in a way, as the UK being able to decide for itself how to control its borders, but I somehow doubt that that is what most people thought it would mean. It goes to the heart of the delusion of the Brexiteer extremists. They always believed that Brexit was about breaking up the EU and smashing all trading rules, and they still can’t understand why not everyone thinks that is a brilliant idea.