Drawing a Line

A week has gone by since the SNP committed to creating a hard border with England. What would that mean for the average voter?

I spent last week at Centre Parcs in Cumbria. In between thoughts of how the bike-friendly Scandinavian forest village with endless leisure time is what the socialist future will be like, I kept thinking about the border I had just crossed. Driving down, I was struck by how there is almost no sign that you are moving from one nation to another. Blink as you pass the Welcome to Scotland/England signs and you’ll miss it.

Another thing that you would have missed if you blinked was the SNP’s announcement that they intend to create a hard border across the island of Britain for the first time in more than three centuries. A plan to make that invisible line I crossed a few days ago rather more obvious.

To understand exactly how historic a change the SNP’s new hard border would be, you can go back to the provisions of the 1707 Act of Union, which guaranteed “full Freedom and Intercourse of Trade and Navigation” and “the same Prohibitions Restrictions and Regulations of Trade and lyable to the same Customs and Duties on Import and Export”. That Union would be repealed, along with countless other measures implemented in the centuries since to ensure free trade across our island. In place of being part of that seamless trading bloc would be economic disintegration and the same border arrangements that have caused so much chaos at Dover, and across our economy, in recent years.

Perhaps it is because so few people believe Scots are likely to choose to leave the UK anytime soon that so little has been written about this new border policy since Nicola Sturgeon launched it. We should be worried about that. If the last few years have taught us anything, it must be to take bad political ideas seriously before we suddenly find they have become economic reality. It’s important to draw a line before this stuff gets a life of its own.

The notes below look at how moving a hard border from Dover to Gretna would impact on us in Scotland. This would be a much more traumatic economic change than Brexit. Brexit erected this border to about 40% of the UK’s exports and about 50% of UK imports, Scexit would place that border between about 60% of Scottish exports and 70% of Scottish imports. In Scotland we export 3 times more into the UK Union than into the European Union. We export 18 times more to the rest of the UK than we do to France - Scotland’s biggest trading partner within the EU. For almost every one of our top ten export sectors, the UK is our most important market.

Source: Institute of Government

In addition to having a greater impact on a bigger flow of trade, the wider disintegration of the UK’s single market, with a change in currency, creation of new regulators and administration systems, would make the upheaval far more significant than Brexit. In simple terms, the UK market is far more integrated than the European one so the pain of disintegration will be greater.

What the SNP’s New Hard Border Means for You

Ok, no more graphs. I’m not going to go deep into the macroeconomic analysis of this impact here. The pointy-heads at the LSE have already done that at length and their research suggested:

• Scotland’s economy would be between 6.5% and 8.7% smaller;

• Border costs for businesses would increase between 15% and 30%;

• The negative impact of Scexit on Scotland’s economy would be two to three times greater than the costs of Brexit and re-joining the EU won’t overturn that damage.

Instead, let’s talk about practicalities rather than abstracts. One of the problems with the campaign against Brexit was that too much of the conversation was about the big numbers rather than the small stories that would have helped voters to realise the impact of a new border to trade on their lives. It helps to think about this in terms of lorries on roads, goods on supermarket trolleys, and businesses seeking customers.

Picture what this new border will look like. Look again at the photo of Brexit tailbacks at Dover at the top of this issue and then remember that we’re talking about a bigger proportion of our trade. Sixty thousands vehicles drive cross what would be the SNP’s new border every day via the M6, A1, A7 and A68. 20 million tonnes of goods come on lorries from England each year and a slightly smaller amount goes in the other direction. Today the lorries carrying much of your weekly shop drive on without noticing they have crossed from England to Scotland. Under Sturgeon’s plans they would face export checks, customs paperwork and safety declarations. Imagine the chaos this will create.

Next picture everything those thousands of lorries carry. Think of any item in your shopping trolley that travels across that border. With the SNP’s new hard border in place, every item produced in England for customers in Scotland would now no longer simply be sold to The Co-op, Asda, Tesco, Morrisons, or Sainsbury’s and then shipped from their distribution centres to your shop. Those products would now be an export for them and an import for us. The same goes for every bottle of whisky, box of fruit or side of Scotch Beef going the other way - they become exports for us, imports for the rest of the UK. That is more expensive. Customs declarations can add £50 a go onto the costs of exporting, an export certificate products of animal origin can cost £175.

Now picture a punnet of soft strawberries. Not in your fridge but in the back of one of those lorries. Food and drink is Scotland’s top international export sector with three quarters of that going to be eaten or drunk in the rest of the UK. Some of that can happily sit in a layby outside Jedburgh while the driver sorts out a mistake with border paperwork - a single malt that’s been ageing in a cask for a decade is in no hurry - but for spoilable goods any delay means losing out to producers in England who don’t have to worry about such things.

If you think that this is hypothetical then look at what has happened with the creation of a border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. British supermarkets have reduced the products they offer on the other side of that border and warned that extra costs mean price rises for customers. And this is the experience of some of the largest companies in our economy. The costs of administrative burden of the SNP’s new border may make exporting too difficult for smaller firms.

In purely political terms, a policy that deliberately seeks to increase the cost of our groceries is brave.

Worse Than Brexit, Worse Than Brexiteers

It’s hardly surprising that polling suggests the creating a hard border makes people significantly less likely to support leaving the UK. However, that isn’t the only reason those of us who oppose nationalism should talk about this. Aside from the practicalities, the border issue should be used to frame the whole nationalist cause.

Think back to Nicola Sturgeon’s interview last year where she was pressed by Andrew Marr on the economic costs of a hard border with England would work:

BBC Politics @BBCPolitics

Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon tells #Marr there would be no border between independent Scotland and the rest of the UK, if it were to then re-join the EU #Brexit #Indyref2 bbc.in/3dMjNAb

“We will put in place arrangements and we will negotiate arrangements with the UK that mean that businesses do not in a practical sense do not suffer from any of that. And of course before we get to a point where we’re asking people to choose whether or not they want Scotland to become independent, which is the choice of the Scottish people, just as we did in 2014, we will set out all of the implications of independence.”

The SNP approach to borders will be familiar to anyone who followed the Brexit debate. It starts with the promise that we can leave the trading bloc without economic consequences. The difference from those arguing to leave the EU is that Nicola Sturgeon is in government. That is why in the interview above and countless other times Nicola Sturgeon had to promise a full plan for how the border would work and how none of the problems of Brexit for exporters would be replicated for exports under Scexit. Even two weeks ago at SNP conference, the Minister for Scexit Angus Robertson, in response to every question about borders, promised great things from the document that was to be published imminently.

Below is the entirety of that long-promised plan to ensure the maintenance of our supermarket supply chains, to maintain free access to our biggest market for Scottish businesses, and to avoid price increases for Scots:

That’s it. I’m not making this up. Check for yourself. That is the whole of it. Even then a quarter of the content is devoted to a vague offer of support for businesses to overcome to practical difficulties the First Minister promised wouldn’t occur.

In this sense Nicola Sturgeon’s approach to borders is worse than that of the Brexiteers. She isn’t an anti-establishment insurgent, she’s First Minister of Scotland. The Brexiteers were not in government, they didn’t have thousands of civil servants working for them to present a plan for their hard border before they asked us to vote for it. Nicola Sturgeon is in government and she either hasn’t asked for the analysis of the costs of her hard border, or if she has, she is hiding it from us. She simply doesn’t care about the economic costs of the border she would create. The lost jobs, higher prices and chaos at the border is a price worth paying for running the flag up the pole.

And remember this is only one part of the SNP’s new economic offer for leaving the UK: a new hard border, giving up the pound after years of economic chaos, and enormous austerity.

Something to Be Proud Of

If Rishi Sunak becomes Prime Minister today he won’t have my support or my vote. He will have my congratulations though in becoming the second ethnic minority Prime Minister and the first Asian to hold our highest office. For all our problems, one of the most attractive things about the UK is how comfortable we have become as a multicultural society. A poll conducted earlier this year for the British Future group found 84% of us either didn’t think it mattered what the ethnicity of the Prime Minister was, or thought that an ethnic minority PM would be an explicit positive in itself. 10% remained poisoned by prejudice, and I’m sure we will hear too much from them in the days ahead, but we can remind them they are in a shrinking minority by putting party politics to one side, just for one moment, and celebrate the significance of Sunak’s appointment.

Culture Corner: Take Heart

This week’s internationalist cultural offering is Take Heart by the Frame’s Glen Hansard. Released earlier this week, and featuring Ukrainian refugees, it is a lovely hopeful song in response to the horrible, brutal war in Ukraine. Hansard says “it’s a prayer sent up into the great cloud of goodwill that circles the globe”.

One Last Thing

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