At the consultation meeting the Lords Party held at our Bournemouth conference, the strongest plea that came from round the table discussing Brexit was for more information on what is happening.  We will take that back to the wider parliamentary party and our small and overworked group of researchers, and see what more we can do.  There are some really good papers from Nick Clegg’s advisory group on the party’s web site, which explore the underlying issues; but the politics of the negotiations are moving and changing almost every week, and I guess that campaigners want usable material to respond to that.  So meanwhile, here are some initial suggestions on how best to play the issues in different places.

The most important shift in the Brexit debate over the summer has been from general principle to detail, as negotiations get under way, and as the deadline of March 2019 begins to loom.  Boris Johnson’s Telegraph article was a denial of where we are – sweeping aside the difficult questions about HOW we manage a mutually-advantageous relationship with the EU after we leave, to argue that those who say Britain will suffer if we don’t get an agreement are talking the country down, and that a close external association with the EU will make the UK ‘a vassal state’, in ‘a national humiliation.’  This, we must all repeat vigorously, is Brexit denial, like climate change denial: refusing to admit the detailed evidence that there are problems to resolve.  The detail matters, we must insist against the ideological sceptics: crashing out without a deal will cause chaos in the UK economy, cost jobs, and endanger standards.

Let’s take the issue of border controls. 2.6 million trucks pass through Dover every year, five times as many as when the Single Market started in 1992.  They spend an average of 2 minutes each passing the border.  If this extended to 20 minutes each (the fastest one estimate suggests they could be cleared outside the customs union), the queues would soon stretch along the M20, supermarket shelves would empty (1/3 of our food is imported from the EU) and assembly lines would grind to a halt (Honda’s Swindon plant alone depends on 350 truck-loads of components a day coming through Dover). Revenue and Customs are trying to introduce a new computer system, but that may not have the capacity to cope with the number of transactions required outside the customs union, and in any case may well not be ready by March 2019.  Estimates of additional customs staff needed by then are in the thousands; but recruitment has not yet begun.  And Boris doesn’t think we need a transition arrangement after that date?

Now translate that into local campaigning; there’s local information to be found from companies and the media.  TheTimes reports that 180,000 British businesses export only to EU markets, so at present don’t have to bother with customs declarations and controls.  Find some of these in your area, and ask them if they have yet calculated the additional costs they will face – in 18 months time, if negotiations break down.  Highlight specific interests in your area that are caught up with a continuing easy flow of goods and people, and discover how they will be hit.  I wrote on Brexit for the Yorkshire Post the other week, focussing on the negative impact on the Humber ports, the loss of protected designation in export markets for products like Wensleydale cheese, and the heavy dependence of the region’s food and agriculture industries on exports to the continent. Other regions will have different interests and examples to quote, including the many component manufacturers feeding into pan-European supply chains.  My impression is that local businesses and trade associations are now becoming  really anxious about the potential ‘cliff edge’ of a breakdown in negotiations as we approach the March 2019 deadline, and frustrated with the government’s incoherence.  One industry representative has just complained to me that when she spells out the practical problems that leaving the customs union presents to her large company’s operations and its complex supply chain. ‘Conservative MPs’ eyes just seem to glaze over’.

Or take another issue: regulation of blood supplies, which are traded internationally, and at present regulated by an EU Agency which the UK will be leaving.  Before these regulations were tightened, the UK imported blood plasma from commercial sources in the US which were contaminated with Hepatitis C and, in some batches, also HIV, infecting thousands of British haemophiliacs and others (google ‘Contaminated Blood Scandal).  A return to looser regulation and commercial supplies will threaten a repeat.

Boris Johnson’s article concludes, after all its bluster about national self-confidence and British greatness, by calling for ‘simplifying regulation and cutting taxes’.  That is the agenda of right-wing Brexiteers: it means lower standards and deteriorating public services.  We should throw that at every Brexiteer we argue with: is that the sort of country we want to go back to?  The Daily Mail is still trying to make fun of health and safety standards after the Grenfell Tower fire, which vividly showed what happens when safety is subordinated to saving money.  Mark Littlewood, director of the Institute of Economic Affairs, argued in The Times recently that post-Brexit Britain has much to learn from Jersey’s economic model: low tax, strong financial services, minimum regulation.   A shrunken state, with an unbalanced economy…  (And of course John McDonnell and left-wing Brexiteers want socialism in one country, the model that President Mitterand unsuccessfully tried in France 40 years ago.)  Behind Boris’s bluster is an odd combination of nationalism and free market capitalism.  Issue by issue, we have to keep pointing out that unregulated markets are for Panama and the Cayman Islands; and we have to challenge their sweeping arguments in one economic sector after another, and in detail.

* William Wallace is Liberal Democrat spokesman on constitutional issues in the Lords.