BREXIT DOWNSIDES SO FAR THIS MONTH.

David Davis once stated there would be no downsides to Brexit. Here are this month’s so far reproduced from the Yorkshire Bylines site which has been adding them up every month.

829. Paperwork: A British man working in Denmark has been told to leave the country, his job and his fiancee after he was four days late submitting an application to stay there post-Brexit. The 47-year-old financial services administrator received his first removal order in May and was devastated to learn it was because he was four days late with new residency documentation that he did not realise he needed post-Brexit.

828. Northern Ireland: Hundreds of people from Northern Ireland, including members of the Orange Order, have applied to give up their British citizenship over the last decade. From 2012, anyone applying to bring a foreign-born spouse to live in the UK had to prove they earned at least £18,600 (€21,230) a year. But, under EU regulations Irish citizens living in the North can bring in a spouse or relative without a minimum income requirement or a costly application process.

827. Stock market: London’s stock exchange has lost its European crown to Paris as economic growth concerns weigh on UK assets. The French capital has taken the top spot after the combined market capitalisation of its major share exchanges, part of the pan-European Euronext project, overtook those of London. Bloomberg, who compiled the figures, say the market capitalisation gap has been narrowing from about $1.5tn since the Brexit vote in 2016.

826. Product certification: Business Secretary Grant Shapps has announced that UK companies will get an additional two years to apply for the new UKCA product safety marking. In an explicit recognition that using the UKCA mark will increase the burden on British firms, the government say that delaying its introduction “will cut costs for business” and remove potential disruption.

825. The economy: A Former member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee has told Bloomberg TV that leaving EU has “permanently damaged” the UK economy. Michael Saunders said: “It’s reduced the economy’s potential output significantly, eroded business investment”, adding: “If we hadn’t had Brexit, we probably wouldn’t be talking about an austerity budget this week.”

824. Paperwork: A German biophysicist and his Indian neurophysicist wife living in the UK with settled status decided to have their first child in India in July. After quickly obtaining a birth certificate and German passport, they were forced to wait 12 weeksfor a UK family entry permit to arrive and had to return to London, leaving the baby with her grandmother in Kolkata, a decision they described as “incredibly hard”.

823. Research: Britain’s plan to become a post-Brexit “science and technology superpower” has suffered a significant setback after a fall in research and development investment of almost a fifth since 2014, according to a report. The Institute for Public Policy Research said the UK’s share of global investment in R&D projects – including in health and life sciences – had fallen sharply from 4.2% eight years ago to 3.4% in 2019 immediately before the Covid pandemic struck.

822. Irish border: The Home Office intends to begin rolling out a ‘Permission to Travel’ scheme from January 2023. UK Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick has confirmed non-Irish EU citizens will have to provide biometric data to enter the UK, including those entering Northern Ireland from Ireland. The move will be introduced under the controversial Nationality and Borders Act due to be put in place next year.

821. Seasonal workers: Fruit pickers recruited from Nepal hired to pick fruit on British farms are being sent home only weeks after they arrived under the seasonal workers scheme. Less than two months after arriving, they were told they were no longer needed and instructed to book flights home leaving them thousands of pounds in debt after borrowing money to cover flights and fees to third-party job brokers. They also face steep airline charges to rearrange return journeys.

820. Car manufacturing: Britain’s electric car ‘revolution’ looks set to lose out to European rivals as Britishvolt, the electric car battery start-up, teeters on the brink of collapse after failing to raise funds. UK car production has halved with just one in ten cars purchased in Britain last year being made here, according to The Telegraph. The paper blames the decline partly on a “lack of investment caused by years of uncertainty about a Brexit deal”.

819. Labour shortages: The head of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) has called for urgent action to bolster the economy, including allowing more overseas workers into Britain as employers struggle with a desperate lack of staff. Tony Danker, the CBI’s director general, said the government needed to “tackle the real barriers we face right now”.

818. Irish passports: Figures obtained by the Irish Times have revealed that the number of Britons applying for Irish passports has skyrocketed by over 1,200% since 2016. Ireland has issued one million passports, making up almost a fifth of its 5.1 million population. According to Dublin, more than 620,000 applicants were based in GB. So far this year 100,526 have been granted an Irish passport, with applications from Northern Ireland having now overtaken those submitted to London.

817. Restaurants: The price of a meal at the UK’s best restaurants has more than doubled since Brexit from £100 a head to more than £200, according to Harden’s Restaurant Guide. The latest edition claims Brexit poses an existential threat to the restaurant business, partly because of rising food prices, but mainly because of the extra cost of hiring staff. Peter Harden said: “Brexit has been absolutely disastrous for the trade.”

816. The economy: Shevaun Haviland, director-general of the British Chambers of Commerce has said the government should cut post-Brexit paperwork for exporters and simplify tax rules via new agreements with the EU as a cost-free ways to help struggling British companies. Ms Haviland added that there was “no evidence” yet of a dividend for the UK from leaving the bloc.

815. Football: According to research by football consultancy Analytics FC and law firm Fragomen and shared with City A.M. and due to be published this week, Brexit has drastically shrunk the pool of footballers available to English clubs without having any clear benefit to the prospects of home-grown talent in the Premier League.

814. Wales: The chair of the Commission for Welsh-speaking Communities has said the “anglicisation” of Welsh speaking villages and towns caused by newcomers snapping up homes after Covid, together with the economic stress of Brexit and the cost-of-living crisis, is pushing the Welsh language to a “tipping point”. Simon Brooks warned that unless action is taken there is a danger that Welsh as a community language could soon be lost in some of its traditional heartlands.

813. The economy: Following the news that the UK economy shrank by 0.2% in the three months to September, the British Chambers of Commerce’s head of research says Europe remains a major export destination and Brexit has introduced barriers to tradethat did not exist before 2021. He added: “Businesses need to see a long-term economic plan that invests in people, skills, and infrastructure and radically improves our trading relationships with key markets, not least across Europe.”

812. Food safety: An article in New Food Magazine raises concerns about food safety in the UK after reductions in funding for environmental health officers and the Food Standards Agency. With only a few exceptions, they say, firms in the UK food industry don’t want de-regulation or a ‘bonfire of red tape’. They see prevailing standards as indispensable to maintaining public trust in the safety and authenticity of their products and claim the instant UK ministers start cutting domestic food standards, “access to the EU for UK food exports will cease”.

811. Labour market: Lord Wolfson, CEO of the fashion retailer Next and keen Brexiter has said the UK’s current immigration policy is crippling economic growth. The peer said: “We have got people queuing up to come to this country to pick crops that are rotting in fields, to work in warehouses that otherwise wouldn’t be operable, and we’re not letting them in. And we have to take a different approach to economically productive migration.”

810. Horizon: The UK’s Europe minister Leo Docherty has called on the EU to reopen British access to EU scientific programmes like Horizon. After meeting with EU representatives at the Parliamentary Partnership Assembly, he said: “We will all benefit from the UK’s participation and it brings no conceivable disadvantage to the EU or its member states but the EU has politicised scientific cooperation by linking it with the Northern Ireland Protocol.”

809. Cost-of-living crisis: Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England has suggested Brexit has added to the UK’s economic woes by lowering the value of the pound and contributing to price rises. Carney told the BBC the fall in the pound and shrinking economy after the UK left the EU had added to “inflationary pressure” and had “slowed the pace at which the economy can grow”.

808. Galileo:The House of Commons science and technology committee have said the government’s failure to obtain guaranteed access to satellite navigation systems essential to defence and critical infrastructure risks endangering national security. The cross-party group of MPs criticised the government for not developing “resilient” alternative positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) systems after losing full access to the EU’s Galileo, which the UK helped fund and build, because of Brexit.

807. NHS: Kemi Badenoch, the new trade secretary, has denied claims the NHS could be set to pay higher costs for drugs as a result of a UK-India trade deal. A leaked chapter of the free trade agreement between UK and India contains provisions that suggests pharmaceutical companies would be able to extend their monopolies and keep prices artificially high for years beyond the original 20-year patent term, preventing the manufacture of lower-priced generic versions.

806. The Channel Islands: A Jersey senator, Philip Ozouf, has claimed that French visitor numbers have dropped ‘off a cliff edge’ after Brexit as the reintroduction of passport requirements followed Britain’s exit from the EU. Previously, tourists from France could enter Jersey using an ID card. Discussions are taking place between Jersey and France to find a solution.

805. Motor racing: The chair of Prodrive, Dave Richards, a builder and racer of rally cars says. “For the motorsport industry [Brexit’s] been a disaster on a number of fronts, with the extra workload that’s required.” His comments came as he waited for his racing team to return from a rally in Spain. “They haven’t got back yet because they’re still sorting out all the paperwork to bring the cars back into the UK”, he explained.

804. Tourism: Brittany Ferries has seen a huge fall in the number of people travelling between Plymouth and France with Brexit being blamed. The cross Channel operator, which has its UK headquarters in Plymouth, is carrying more than 100,000 fewer people between Millbay and Roscoff compared with pre-pandemic. The company blame the post-Brexit imposition of passports for French passengers visiting the UK Brexit has also been blamed for a drop in freight traffic between the UK and Europe.

803. Science: UK scientists have been told they can no longer take part in meetings organised by a key EU infectious diseases agency due to Brexit tensions, according to The National in Scotland. An infectious disease expert has been advised that his invitation to two meetings by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) has been cancelled. Martin McKee, professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said: “This is a recognition that Brexit has consequences, and the form of Brexit the UK has chosen has more severe consequences than were necessary.”

802. Battery plant: Britishvolt, the UK government-backed battery startup is close to entering administration with the potential loss of almost 300 jobs, after it was unable to find investors willing to fund its giant £3.8bn “gigafactory” in Blyth. Professor Chris Grey pointed out on Twitter that the decision may have important repercussions since from 2027 UK made electric vehicles sold in the EU will need to comply with stringent rules of origin, which may not be possible without Britishvolt.

801. Farming: UK meat industry lobby groups are warning that a new post-Brexit regulation will have a “devastating effect” on producers and their ability to export to the EU, according to the FT.From  13 December the UK Department for Agriculture will require tens of thousands of farmers to obtain formal attestations from qualified vets about the health of their animals earmarked for slaughter and export. The new regulation is a significant shift from present rules which require farmers only to certify that vet visits have taken place.

800. Trade: New export figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) for April to June 2022 show UK exports have collapsed to the EU Big Four of Germany, France, Italy and Spain. The international delivery service ParcelHero says exports to the vital markets of the USA and China slumped as well. David Jinks, says: “these latest results reveal Britain failed to successfully transition away from the EU to other lucrative overseas markets – one of the positive outcomes promised by Brexiteers. Looking at two vital export markets beyond the EU, the numbers also tumbled.”

799. Trade: The Herald in Scotland reports that Scottish exports to the EU have slumped by over £2.2bn since Brexit. HMRC data, seen by the Herald show that the value of Scotland’s exports has slumped from £16.741bn in 2019, the year before the UK exited the EU to £14.528bn in 2021 – a drop of over 13% in two years, reversing a trend that had seen Scotland’s exports to EU countries rise by £420mn between 2018 and 2019.

798. Citizens’ rights: The British government has been accused of breaching the withdrawal agreement by requiring EU citizens to reapply for the right to live and work in the United Kingdom, an independent body set up to oversee citizens’ rights told a London court on Tuesday. The Independent Monitoring Authority (IMA) says the Home Office’s post-Brexit settlement scheme unlawfully requires up to 2.6 million EU citizens to make a second application after being allowed to remain in the UK or lose their rights of residence.

797. The City: London’s share of global foreign exchange and derivatives trading is falling and under threat for the first time since Brexit. According to new findings published exclusively by City A.M, a study by the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) found that while London accounted for 43% of global FX trading in 2019, it now accounts for 38%. Over-the-counter derivatives markets, saw its share slip to 46%, down from 51% three years ago with Singapore and New York gaining ground.

796. Farming: According to The Guardian, farmers may miss out on thousands of pounds after government chaos over the post-Brexit nature-friendly farming schemes, developed to replace the EU’s old subsidy system which paid according how much land they managed, caused them not to apply. Long delays over implementing the schemes – first proposed by Michael Gove when he was environment secretary in 2018, but delayed many times since then – has fuelled anxiety that they might be diluted or dropped altogether.

795. Labour shortages: Celebrity chef Jason Atherton says the government has made recruitment a “bureaucratic nightmare” since Brexit. Mr Atherton has warned in The Evening Standard that he will have to start closing thriving restaurants in the new year because it has become impossible to recruit staff. The celebrity restaurateur said he has 350 unfilled vacancies — representing about a third of his workforce — and faces having to make “heartbreaking” decisions as a result of the unprecedented shortfall with January being “crunch time”.

It appears DAVID DAVIS was badly wrong about there being no downsides to BREXIT. The above are only for the first fifteen days of November.

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