Neil Moors wrote:In the spirit of being as objective as possible, you could argue that for all the losses from Brexit, one positive would have been decent jobs in Dover (as mentioned earlier) as a result of the new checks requirements.
Yes, one could so argue and - let us be clear - these are new checks on EU goods, not existing checks on non-EU goods like those from Colombia for instance. Mind you, Jeremy Hunt (touted by some as a successor to Boris) argued back in 2018 that "it was possible to have "frictionless trade" with the European Union while leaving the single market and the customs union" - so no jobs there. But that was then and we are all much wiser (or at least better-informed) now.
So jobs yes, but of course there's no such thing as a free lunch: today's Telegraph reports JRM as saying that the new physical checks would've cost British business up to £1bn
per year. I have no particular reason to doubt him and I have a sneaky suspicion who would've ended up paying.
