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Surely this wasn’t stuffed in a Vote Leave pamphlet circa 2016, was it? The travel chaos witnessed at the Port of Dover this week is the clearest example of chickens coming home to roost you could wish to see – and experts say Brexit is making it harder for Brits to LEAVE the country.
Tailbacks stretching for miles and queues of eight hours or more have been reported by motorists stuck in this travel nightmare. A chronic shortage of border patrol staff has exacerbated a problem created by the UK’s decision to plough ahead with Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal.
Tighter and tougher controls at the border aren’t a one-way thing – as thousands of people looking to make a summer getaway found out this week. Despite turning down a proposal to DOUBLE the amount of toll booths at Dover in 2020, the Tories are already shifting the blame.
Liz Truss called on France to act over ‘entirely avoidable’ delays at the border, saying: “We need action from France to build up capacity at the border to limit any further disruption for British tourists and to ensure this appalling situation is avoided in future.”
Alas, this is a version of events that Simon Calder is refusing to buy into. The travel expert is senior authority figure on matters such as these, and he was in no mood to sugarcoat the situation this week.
“It’s a grim situation. Up until the start of last year, you could still pass through even when it was busy. But now everything has changed. The blunt fact is leaving the EU has now made leaving the UK much more difficult.”
“This is not a COVID thing. The frontier line is that we asked for all of this. They aren’t picking on us, the UK voted to become third-country nationals. We wanted all this bureaucracy, this is what we asked for.” | Simon Calder
