The Davis Downside Dossier

Singer Kim Wilde has been forced to find “ways around” the Brexit restrictions on musicians travelling around the EU. She told BANG Showbiz when asked if she and her backing group had been hit by the fallout from the 2020 referendum vote to quit the bloc: “We have found ways around it. There have been some issues that needed sorting out, some complications from time to time. But, luckily, nothing we haven’t been able to overcome.” Miss Wilde's remarks come after a survey found almost half of UK musicians and workers in the music industry have had less work in the EU since Brexit than before it.

According to The Daily Telegraph, Spain is about to impose a hard border on Gibraltar in the absence of a Brexit deal for the Rock, authorities in Gibraltar have warned. The government of the overseas territory told residents they will face full Brexit border controls for the first time once new EU border systems are in place in November, after talks aimed at finding an agreement reached deadlock. Gibraltarians face tighter controls, including a 90-day limit on visa-free travel to the EU every 180 days, and a requirement to submit their fingerprints and facial photos in automated border booths before entering Spain.

One Air, the UK's sole operator of B747 freighters, is lobbying the government to establish a bilateral agreement with the EU to ease post-Brexit bottlenecks. These include difficulties in hiring pilots and engineers and accessing maintenance facilities due to the UK's exit from the EU Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). NED Paul Simmons revealed the lack of reciprocity in professional qualifications between the UK and EU following Brexit has led to increased costs and operational inefficiencies for One Air, impacting its growth. Simmons believes the lack of mutual recognition is a bureaucratic oversight and has urged swift policy changes.

The Daily Telegraph carries a story of a Cotswold couple who moved to France to afford their own home without being saddled with a huge mortgage. The piece is sub-titled: Britons ditch the land of red tape to pursue dream of home ownership on the Continent. Phil and Kirsti Coley say the move also created business opportunities unaffordable back home. Mr Coley claimed: “The barriers to starting your own retail business with high street frontage in France compared to the UK are hugely different. In the UK I could expect to pay between £15,000 to £20,000 in rates a year for this type of premises which we’ve turned into office and workshop space with a coffee shop. Here, it’s just £1,000 a year.”

A research briefing for the House of Commons Library puts the Treasury's latest estimate of the UK's divorce bill agreed as part of the 2019 Withdrawal Agreement at £30.2 bn with £23.8 billion of that having been paid as of December 2023. This excludes £2.9 bn of contributions still owing to the European Development Fund (EDF) until the current programme ends in 2026. The Gross figure was £48.6 bn less £18.4 bn of receipts.

Liz Webster, the founder of Save British Farming, a lobby group campaigning to rejoin the Single Market, has blamed Brexit for a crisis in Britain's berry-growing sector. British Berry Growers (BBG), representing more than 95% of locally-grown berries sold in the UK, found almost half of growers (47%) reported not making a profit, suggesting that 40% could go out of business by the end of 2026. Ms Webster says “Brexit removed food subsidies and labour supply, pushing inflation further. Brexit also added trade barriers for exports reducing the market for sales.”

Sir Alex Younger a former MI6 chief, has told ITV that Britain has been “marginalised” by Brexit. He said: “Putin would’ve been absolutely delighted by our decision (to leave the EU) and so would Xi.” Sir Alex added that when he travels around Europe, he is profoundly depressed. “Just nobody mentions the UK. We've made ourselves irrelevant. And this is extraordinary. The beginning part of this century, we were the dominant force. France has effectively eclipsed us and you just don't hear a discussion of us.”

An Italian-born police officer working in Manchester has been forced to quit his job after the salary threshold to sponsor his Italian wife to live in post-Brexit UK was raised to £29,000. Dani, has been in the UK since 2017 and has full settled status under the post-Brexit residency scheme for EU citizens but, with one year into a two-year probation period training to be a detective, earns only £26,000, £3,000 short of the sum needed to act as sponsor to bring a foreign family member into the country.

Amid warnings of long delays at entry points into Britain, the EU has announced a delay in the implementation date of the European Entry/Exit system (EES) from 6 October to 10 November. Getlink, the operator of Le Shuttle, which takes vehicles through the Channel tunnel, has spent €78m (£66m) providing new facilities to ensure a smooth introduction. It expects EES will mean an additional six to seven minutes to process a carful of passengers, reports The Guardian.

Labour's pledge to build 1.5mn homes in England over the next 5 years is at risk due to a shortfall of more than 150,000 skilled construction workers, according to Tim Balcon, CEO of the Construction Industry Training Board (CITB). Among the factors driving the net loss are an ageing workforce and changes to UK immigration rules as a result of Brexit, which led to a steady decline in the numbers of immigrant construction workers.

Nick Thomas-Symonds, the UK's ministerial envoy to the EU, has told the FT, “What business wants is fewer barriers to trade [with the EU].”  Mr Thomas-Symonds said Britain wanted “structured dialogue to happen as soon as possible” to build closer ties on a wide range of issues including security, dismantling trade barriers and migration. He confirmed that Britain was also seeking an UK-EU leaders’ summit to help seal the new partnership, saying both sides would be “laying some groundwork for this in the autumn”.

The Covid-19 inquiry led by Baroness Hallet has officially found that senior health officials were diverted to plan for a “no deal Brexit” – ultimately killing more people when Covid struck in 2020, reports The iNews. In the same month that the UK’s first two Covid cases were discovered, a cabinet-level body that had created the pandemic flu readiness board was effectively abolished before its work was completed, leaving a “significant amount” unfinished, and in particular any surge planning for the health and social care sectors.

The King's speech this week contained proposals for new legislation to make it easier for the UK to recognise and adopt new EU product safety laws to prevent businesses from being burdened with new costs and red tape. The government could “recognise new or updated EU product regulations, including the CE marking where appropriate, to prevent additional costs for businesses and provide regulatory stability” but without having any influence over the regulations themselves.

A Labour councillor in Portsmouth has blamed Brexit for the shortage of ADHD medicine. Cllr Tom Coles said the shortage has resulted in people having to “trawl around pharmacies” searching for available stock. Another Cllr, Matthew Winnington, said: “Whether you think Brexit is a good or bad thing, I think pretty much the consensus is the way that Brexit was handled, and indeed what it did to our medicine supply chain has been an absolute disaster.”

Research by UK in a Changing Europe (UKICE) shows that EU citizens, who are not given a physical ID card but rather need to navigate an online process to use and prove their status, have reported on frequent glitches in that system. But, according to UKICE, even when it is working in a technical sense, the system does not work well for marginalised and vulnerable EU citizens, including many Roma, who often struggle to independently generate a ‘share code’ to prove status to an employer or prospective landlord.

The Court of Appeal has ruled that two Albanians whose applications to settle in the UK were refused under the EU Settlement Scheme had their rights under the Withdrawal Agreement breached and that their appeals should have been allowed. Their passports had been stamped with the words “Admitted to the United Kingdom under the Immigration (EEA) Regulations 2016” and the Home Office had argued this did not give any right of residence. The Court found that it amounted to facilitation of residence within the meaning of Article 10(2). It’s not known how many other applicants to the EUSS were wrongfully rejected.

While 52 out of 56 countries worldwide are expected to see a rise in the number of millionaires resident, the UK is forecast to lose 17%, more than any of the other four nations where a fall is forecast. This is according to a recent report by the Swiss bank UBS and reported by the FT. The research also revealed that more millionaires had been leaving the UK than arriving over the past decade, with the UK suffering a net loss of 16,500 millionaires between 2017 and 2023. The UK’s withdrawal from the EU was said to be a factor.

According to the FT, Labour's plans for closer alignment with the EU to boost trade and economic growth is not a simple or immediate fix to the problems caused by Brexit for several reasons, not least because there is no consensus in affected industries about what benefits different models of alignment might achieve.

An article in the London Review of Books by an anonymus GP about the shortages of medicines in the UK claims that in order to overcome trade barriers erected because of Brexit, the NHS is now paying extra costs to a private company – the international logistics firm Kuehne and Nagel - to circumvent those barriers. The National Supply Disruption Response was introduced in 2020 to give clinical providers access to an ‘express freight’ mechanism.

In a recent interview on BBC Radio 4, the government's new chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said: “Brexit was definitely a problem for science. We were part of a very successful European funding scheme with very large collaborations, right the way across Europe.” He added, “You can’t do the type of science that everyone’s trying to do and make progress in isolation. You need brains that come with other backgrounds, other thought processes, other training.”