Avoid scrutiny

I remember a colleague I had early on in my career giving me some advice to follow as a future Head of Department: avoid scrutiny.

Since the referendum result, and the lies of the campaigners to Leave the EU, there have been many things that were obviously going to happen which we were told by those Conservative MPs involved would definitely not happen. Paperwork? (just send it to Boris Johnson - there won't be any holdups remember - Michael Gove told us)

They are now doing anything to blame someone else...

One area which was always going to be impacted was the fishing industry. For a while, it seemed like this might even leave to a no deal Brexit. There was eventually a deal signed, which received a few hours of debate before being voted on - no chance for scrutiny. 

The  OBVIOUS consequences of leaving the EU are now emerging, and things will get worse. Prices are rising. Some food shortages are inevitable. We are already being bypassed by Irish ferry companies and other businesses will no longer ship goods to the UK. Some businesses are simply stopping trading.

Meanwhile Jacob Rees Mogg has closed down a committee which would have helped bring the lies of Michael Gove and all the other Leave campaigners into the open and hopefully hold them to account. And there's a clip of Boris Johnson completely failing to answer a question from an SNP MP about the collapse of an industry which employs hundreds of families, and Mogg just laughing and saying the fish rotting on the docks were "happy to be British". And Dominic Raab's lack of spatial awareness was always 'laughable' (but dangerous).

The next few months are going to be rocky, even without the terrible mishandling of the pandemic...


I also 'liked' the irony of Roger Daltrey adding his name to a letter campaigning against the limits on musicians touring in the EU having been a supporter of Brexit and saying that there would be no problems at the time - presumably assuming loss of free movement wouldn't apply to people like him.

And this Financial Times piece reminds us that for our 'sovereignty' - whatever you imagine that to be - we got 'the worst possible deal' and quotes this business:

Meanwhile, at Aston Chemicals in Aylesbury, the doors slammed shut on its final shipment to the EU. After more than 30 years of exporting to the European cosmetics industry, the bureaucracy introduced by the Brexit trade deal had rendered the trade uneconomic. “It was emotional but we had no choice". The company will now serve its EU ­customers from Poland.

As David Wolman said in his piece in Wired, which I referred to in my 'Why Study Geography?' book.

I’m here and you’re there—boom, geography. Yet in an era when we can fly anyplace, learn anything online, order just about everything from Amazon, and use Google Earth to zoom in on faraway lands, we can get lulled into thinking that our spatial reality amounts to little more than an afterthought.

A little more thought by a great many people would have avoided this additional layer of stress and disruption at an already deeply troubled time. Some businesses are actually setting up new EU subsidiary companies to get around the issues... jobs are being created but just not in the UK

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