The big tear will take place on Sunday 13, the feast of Santa Lucia. But already yesterday the Japanese of Honda have launched the extraordinary plan to supply the English plant in Swindon with the components necessary for the production lines of the Civic, thus avoiding the stop in production: the factory, in the coming weeks, will be supplied by an airlift, as happens at war to overrun enemy territory. In fact, the damages of the pandemic which have severely affected the activity of the ports of the United Kingdom are added to the threat of Brexit.
Maersk, the world's largest container operator, has decided to move the terminus of one of the lines connecting South America with the United Kingdom towards the ports of the continent: too high, is the explanation, the risk of ending up in a traffic jam worthy of the worst mid-August. More or less the motivation behind the choice of the Chinese of OOCL, a state-owned company that elected Belgium and Greece as new terminals of his travels to Europe.
And so on, with the obvious consequence of rising costs and prices. George Griffiths of S&P global, claims that container tariffs to Great Britain have risen by 12% or 500 dollars each. A real drain which, according to Michael Gove, a close collaborator of Boris Johnson, "depends on many reasons, from Christmas to the pandemic, but which it is absurd to attribute to Brexit".
In reality, the true consequences of Brexit will only be discovered over time unless an agreement is reached in extremis on Sunday, however unlikely. The two delegations vied with each other at the last dinner in Brussels in reiterating that they "have shown their utmost good will" before sitting down at the table for a real banquet: scallops (the English ones will cost 20% more due to duties), pumpkin soup, steamed turbot in wasabi and pea sauce, Pavlova cake with exotic fruits. In short, the appetite hasn't failed when it comes to digesting the first results of the new set-up. London wasted no time in canceling EU tariffs on the US in the context of the dispute between Airbus and Boeing (4 billion dollars). And just yesterday London concluded the first post-Brexit agreement, not surprisingly with Singapore, judged as a possible model for the new United Kingdom which, in truth, has very few trump cards to replicate the boom of its former colony.
It will not be easy to calculate the cost of the rip which involves industry (more than 1 million Europeans are involved in the car alone), finance, so far concentrated in the United Kingdom, services and agriculture (the United Kingdom now imports 80% of the food it consumes, the trade imbalance with Italy exceeds 22 billion euros). It is taken for granted weakness of the pound, favored by a policy of rates that are even lower than those in Europe. Gilles Moec of Axa is the most negative: London risks 10% of its GDP. But, notes the Financial Times, someone will definitely gain: crime. “Scotland Yard – notes the newspaper – uses the European police databases a few million times a year. But from next year, access will be limited: we will be less safe”.
