On Sunday Morning, the interview by Andrew Marr with Arron Banks introduced an opinion that was something of a surprise to me, but then I confess I believe that leaving the EU is a mistake. Arron stated that the Financial Times was anti-Brexit. The reason I found this a surprise was the number of times I have seen FT articles that are clearly in support of Brexit. However whoever of us is right and wrong, it is hard to ignore a piece of news that appeared in the paper in the last few hours that is reporting on a Government plan to address a possible No Deal Brexit, something that Arron and his chums want to see achieved, and which the Government has long been arguing is better than a bad deal. The plan regarding road haulage was published yesterday and the image shown above is from the plan regarding how lorries should apply for permits to travel to the EU. At present the number of British lorries that do so amounts to 40,000 a year and currently if we wanted to increase this number to 50,000 because we increased our trade with the Continent, there is no barrier apart from the number of ferries and trains going under the Channel. However if we do leave the EU without a deal then we will need to apply for licences to cross into the EU and because these are distributed through the European Conference of Ministers of Transport (ECMT) we will currently be allowed 3,816 out of the total number available. This may change in due course, particularly once the impact of a lack of lorries begins to bite into our economy and more importantly when it comes to changing things, the economy of 27 other nations. However it may not. Either way to go from 40,000 to 3,816 will have a major impact on our economy. No doubt Arron and his team along with people like Boris and Jacob will have ideas regarding how we can overcome this barrier, perhaps once they have stopped blaming the Government and the Financial Times they will tell us what their plan is. I confess that the business I am part of relies extensively on goods coming from Europe, such as Bose speakers, Sennheiser Microphones, Shure Microphones, Extron control equipment etc. If the number of lorries is cut down by 90% then I suspect our business will reach the end of our working life reasonably quickly after 29^th March next year if no alternative to this is found!

That said we are an engineering company and we will attempt to find solutions to the problem because that is the nature of engineering. However most of the Universities and other clients we work for have expectations regarding what products we will use and so our capacity may be limited. On the other hand the Politicians could apply their efforts to resolving this matter ahead of March next year!