The £15m Brexit white elephant standing idle on a Hull dock

Mothballed Border Control Post may never be used

Almost exactly nine years ago I stood amid the remaining debris of St. Andrew’s Dock and watched a flotilla of boats making their way up the Humber.

Flotillas always sound a great idea on paper but, in my experience, they usually turn out to be a bit naff in real life. This one was no exception.

Strung out like ragged clothes on a washing line, a handful of rusty old vessels bedecked with Union Jacks and banners sailed past the small group of people gathered on the former dock’s bullnose.

The Humber Brexit Flotilla included a couple of small fishing boats and a few pleasure craft.

Among those watching on the bullnose was Hull-based UKIP MEP Mike Hookem who knew a thing or two about the dock and Hull’s fishing history. His older brother Keith was just 19-years-old when he lost his life along with 17 other crew members of the Ross Cleveland when the trawler was lost in a storm off the Icelandic coast in January 1968.

“Look at the state of this place, it’s a disgrace,” said Hookem, gesturing at the surrounding decay and dereliction.

The dock was a mess (it still is) but he must have known that if the UK voted in favour of leaving the European Union a few days later, Hull’s former fishing industry wasn’t going to miraculously rise from the grave any time soon.

After all, the once mighty Hull fleet had plundered distant Arctic waters rather than the much closer but less lucrative fishing grounds of the North Sea while, more recent times, several UK fishing companies had actually sold their coastal quota rights to foreign firms. By 2019 just over half of England’s annual quota (130,000 tonnes of fish worth £160m) was in the hands of companies based in Iceland, Spain and the Netherlands.

Instead, Hookem offered vague hopes of Brexit ushering in a new Brexit golden age for the UK fishing industry while glossing over Nigel Farage’s dismal record of only turning up to only one of 42 European Parliament’s fisheries committee meetings while he was an MEP and a member of the committee.

Also standing on the bullnose that day was the Haltemprice and Howden MP David Davis. He had attended a Vote Leave rally in Sunderland the night before and still seemed to be on a high from it, confidently predicting the tide was turning in their favour.

I distinctly remember his Cheshire Cat grin as he delivered his forecast, based partly on embargoed polling data which he stressed he couldn’t talk about yet but then proceeded to talk about. “Wonderful isn’t it!” he beamed, waving as the Only Fools and Horses-style version of Pirates of the Caribbean carried on chugging up the estuary in front of us.

As various UKIP and Conservative supporters around me started cheering, I wondered if the world - or at least this tiny part of it - had gone mad. Never mind the flotilla, I got the impression this lot would have happily jumped into a rudderless paddle-free canoe heading straight for Niagara Falls as long as Brexit was secured.

A couple of weeks later Davis was the new Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, famously leaning on an empty glass table while EU negotiator Michel Barnier sat opposite, equipped with pen and a neat bundle of paperwork.

As it turned out, his subsequent achievements as Brexit Secretary would struggle to fill the back of a postage stamp. His apparent unpreparedness captured in that photograph taken on day two of the Brexit talks in Brussels was later reinforced by Barnier himself who expressed concerns about Davis’ commitment to the negotiations.

In October that year, Davis famously told MPs: “There will be no downside to Brexit at all, and considerable upsides.” The phrase prompted citizen journalism platform Yorkshire Bylines to launch The Davis Downside Dossier.

It started out as a tongue-in-cheek takedown of Davis’ suggestion that you could effectively shrink the UK’s domestic by 85% without any consequences but the Dossier subsequently turned into a must-read ongoing chronicle of disaster.

When the milestone of 2,000 downsides (and 39 upsides) was reached last September, Dossier compiler Anthony Robinson announced it was officially being retired.

In the last chapter featuring a final 23 downsides, Robinson wrote:

“Davis stood at the despatch box in the House of Commons in October 2016 and breezily exclaimed, ‘there will be no downside to Brexit at all, and considerable upsides’. There can be no doubt that the minister for leaving the EU at the time didn’t have a clue, although as we now know, that wasn’t something limited to him on the government benches.

“His words marked the beginning of three years of impasse and bitter parliamentary argument, resulting in both Davis and the prime minister resigning, only to be replaced by the likes of Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and David Frost, not to mention Liz Truss, vessels even emptier and no less incompetent than himself, and the total collapse of any remaining trust in the British political class.

“In the 2024 general election, the Conservative Party paid the price. Eight years of relentless focus on Brexit at the expense of the urgent and important, ended as voters woke up and noticed that nothing in the country worked any more. Living standards were falling while the ruling party wallowed in an overflowing cesspit of scandal, sleaze and corruption. The Tories deservedly fell to their worst ever election defeat.

“Davis, or Sir David as we must now call him, was knighted in the 2023 New Years honours list, for ‘public and political service’ revealing all that’s wrong with modern Britain.

“In claiming Brexit would have no downsides he wasn’t just mistaken or misguided, he was flat wrong. Only Daniel Hannan stands between him and the eternal shame of being the unchallenged world record holder in the wrongness stakes. Hannan’s reward was a seat in the upper chamber.

“Brexit turned Britain into a Conservative kakistocracy: government by the least qualified and most inept citizens.

“However, Davis isn’t completely useless. He stands as an example to people everywhere, that limited expertise is no barrier to being an MP. He has even persuaded companies to employ him for the benefit of his ‘advice’. Most people might question what you could learn from the Right Honourable member for Goole and Pocklington that you couldn’t find out quicker from an eight-year-old child, or indeed a wet finger in the air.”

Despite all this, as Robinson points out, Davis - like most of Brexit’s political architects - have emerged from its ruins relatively unscathed.

“He and others at ground zero of the disaster like Johnson, Michael Gove and Nigel Farage, are all doing very well, thank you. They all display an ‘I’m alright Jack’ attitude, as the project they championed continues to blight the national life of this country in virtually every conceivable way, from trade to touring musicians and from immigration and inward investment to agriculture and energy.

“And it isn’t done with us yet by any means.

“Brexit has often been described as a ‘slow puncture’ in the economy, which makes Keir Starmer’s ‘make Brexit work’ mantra sound rather hollow and ridiculous. How he intends to make a hole in a tyre ‘work’ for the British people is not entirely clear.”

Nine months after Robinson penned those words I was reminded of the blind optimism of Davis, Hookem, et al while reading a new report by Sally Johnson, the Chief Inspector of the Hull and Goole Port Health Authority (HGPHA).

In the report, she noted that Labour’s recent re-set agreement on post-Brexit trade with the EU would almost certainly make the new and unused £15m Hull Border Control Post (BCP) at King George Dock officially redundant.

“It is envisaged that this will result in most movements of animals, animal products, plants, and plant products between Great Britain and the European Union being undertaken without the certificates or controls that are currently required under the rules applied by the Border Target Operating Model (BTOM). This could effectively mean that the import controls currently undertaken by the authority on goods from the EU cease, rendering the new services and purpose-built port infrastructure redundant.”

In other words, a system of checks and charges on key imports required as a result of knowingly withdrawing from an established trading bloc of countries which should have been in place nearly five years ago but has never been fully implemented is now being scrapped.

As a result, all the currently mothballed purpose-built hi-tech BCPs around the country like the one in Hull face an uncertain future.

Delays in bringing in full import checks - nine of them at the last count - have been variously blamed on Covid, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the cost of living crisis by a succession of government ministers. In reality, the necessary workforce didn’t exist to carry out an inspection regime equivalent to what UK businesses now have deal with exporting into the EU after Brexit killed off frictionless cross-border trade. In addition, the deliberate delays in introducing full checks kicked inspection charges on goods arriving from the EU further down the road, avoiding the inevitability of the costs being passed onto consumers.

It was the unlikely figure of Jacob Rees Mogg who finally broke ranks and told the truth when interviewed about the latest delay under his brief tenure as Minister for Brexit Opportunities (a short-lived ridiculous job title if there ever was one).

“It would have been an act of self-harm had we gone ahead with it. It would have increased costs for people and we are trying to reduce costs,” he said with a straight face.

Even when the BTOM was finally introduced just over a year ago in the dying days of the Sunak government, it was only a bit of a half-way house with the requirement for full physical inspections of goods being substantially watered down from what had been envisaged a few years earlier.

Since its launch, things still haven’t exactly gone smoothly, as Sally Johnson notes in her report.

“Whilst progress has been made, the implementation of the BTOM has continued to present operational and regulatory challenges, including high costs and additional bureaucracy for trade, delays on full implementation and policy clarification, planning uncertainty for businesses and port health authorities alike, complex risk categorisation, IT failures and lack of EU reciprocity.”

It’s probably worth adding that the EU’s reluctance to change its own trading rules and standards is entirely understandable. They work perfectly well for the EU, as they did for the UK when we were a member state.

Instead, we were sold the big lie of taking back control when, in reality, we had no idea on how to turn fantasy into reality.

So I’m adding a final Brexit downside to the Davis Dossier - a £15m white elephant standing idle on a Hull dockside, not far from the spot further along the city’s waterfront where we were all told it was going to all go swimmingly all those years