The Man Who Made Things

Somewhere in the archive of my own memory, filed under “things I said out loud in 2016 and lived to regret being right about,” there’s a version of me standing in a Hull kitchen telling a mate that leaving the customs union without a plan for what replaced it was going to be a slow puncture, not a clean break. He told me I was being dramatic. I told him I’d been trained to read risk for a living and this one had all the hallmarks. We didn’t fall out over it. We just stopped talking about it, the way you do with the things that turn out to matter most.

Ten years on, I don’t feel vindicated. I want to be clear about that before I go any further, because it would be easy, and satisfying in a cheap sort of way, to write this as an I-told-you-so. I’m not going to. What I actually feel, reading the numbers that came out this week, is something closer to grief. Slow, administrative grief, for a version of the country that had a working relationship with its nearest neighbour and quietly, deliberately, dismantled it.

The number and the man behind it

Logistics UK, an organisation with no discernible interest in flags of any kind, put a figure on it: £11.7bn a year in lost exports, £400 per household, evaporated. Not stolen. Not squandered on anything glamorous. Just gone, absorbed into the friction of a border that used to not exist and now very much does.

Numbers like that are designed to be skimmed. They’re too large to hold in your hand, so the mind slides off them and reaches for the next headline. I’ve spent enough years writing about systemic harm to know that the way you make a number like that mean something is you go looking for the one person it happened to.

His name is Douglas Doherty. He runs a boutique audio manufacturer near Newcastle, the kind of business that takes years of graft and a genuine obsession with the craft to build. He was selling hundreds of units into Germany. Building momentum in Italy. The sort of quiet, unglamorous export success that never makes a minister’s speech but is, in aggregate, the actual substance of a functioning economy.

Then Brexit happened, properly happened, tariffs and paperwork and all, and the inquiries simply stopped. Not slowed. Stopped. He told The Independent that German customers “obviously knew there was going to be difficulty getting it in,” so they didn’t bother asking. There’s no scandal in that sentence. No villain, no smoking gun, no conspiracy to uncover. Just a market that quietly decided the hassle wasn’t worth it, and a man who now hands twenty per cent of his margin to an English reseller with a European arm, paying rent to get back into a country that used to be his for free.

I keep coming back to that twenty per cent. It’s such a precise, bureaucratic sort of tragedy. Nobody voted for it. Nobody debated it on Question Time. It’s just the toll booth that got built on a road that used to be open, and Doherty pays it every single month, quietly, because the alternative is not selling into Europe at all.

The choreography of not doing anything

The political detail in all this that I find genuinely difficult to write about with any patience is Andy Burnham. Not because he’s uniquely culpable. Because he was, until roughly a week ago, being sold as the exception. The bolder option. The man who’d go further than Starmer on Europe, further than the red lines allow, further than the careful triangulated silence that’s defined Labour’s approach to Brexit since they got into government.

Labour MPs voted for it. In the Commons. A majority in favour of rejoining the single market and customs union, sat there in Hansard for anyone to check.

And Burnham looked at that, looked at the £11.7bn, looked at 98.2 per cent of British businesses saying they want the single market back, and confirmed he’d be sticking to Starmer’s red lines after all.

I don’t think that makes him a hypocrite exactly. I think it makes him a fairly accurate weathervane for something more uncomfortable, which is that British politics has decided the honest conversation about Brexit is simply not one anyone in power is willing to have out loud, regardless of what the paperwork, the businesses, or their own back benches are telling them. The government’s own spokesperson, in the same statement responding to these figures, pivoted straight to boasting about export growth with India, the US, and the Gulf. True, as far as it goes. And entirely beside the point being made about the market forty minutes from Dover.

That’s not a rebuttal. That’s a magician showing you his other hand.

The return I didn’t make

I’ll admit something here I don’t say often. There was a point, a couple of years into this cave-dwelling, off-grid existence, when I seriously looked at going back. Homesickness does strange arithmetic on you at two in the morning. I found myself pricing up flats, checking energy costs, doing the sums on what a modest, unremarkable British life would actually cost to run.

And the numbers didn’t just fail to add up. They laughed at me.

What I was looking at wasn’t the country I’d left. It was a country where the cost of simply existing, heating a home, running a car, buying food that hadn’t been quietly repriced by five years of import friction, had drifted somewhere well beyond what I could sustain. I’d have traded a life where I grow some of what I eat and heat water with the sun, mostly, for a life spent doing mental arithmetic in the supermarket aisle, working out which direct debit I’d be sacrificing that month.

I want to be honest about the limits of that comparison. I can’t hand you a clean causal line from Brexit to my own spreadsheet; the cost of living crisis has plenty of parents, and I’m not daft enough to pin the whole thing on one referendum. But I’d be lying if I said the trade friction, the shrinking export base, the general sense of an economy quietly treading water while telling itself it’s swimming, played no part in what I was looking at. It’s the same economy Douglas Doherty is standing in, handing over his twenty per cent. It’s the same economy Burnham just decided not to disturb. I looked at it from the outside, from a cave with patchy signal and a gas ring, and decided I’d rather stay poor here, on my own terms, than go home and be poor there, on someone else’s.

That’s not a comfortable thing to put in writing. But comfortable was never really the brief.

What I actually think this is about

There’s something about watching British politics from this distance, kettle on a gas ring, patchy signal, that strips away the theatre and leaves you with the plumbing. And the plumbing, from here, looks like this: a country that built a genuinely useful piece of infrastructure, tore it out over a matter of principle, and has spent every year since finding new, more elaborate ways to avoid admitting the water pressure’s never come back.

I’m not going to tell you the answer is simply “rejoin the single market,” though a fair few of the people quoted in that report would. I don’t know if that’s politically survivable, and I’m wary of anyone who tells you they do. What I do know is that 15 million hours a year are currently being spent by British businesses filling in customs declarations that didn’t exist five years ago, and that time isn’t a metaphor. It’s real hours, real people, real cost, sat inside a number that’s easy to skim past.

Doherty didn’t get a say in any of that. He just makes very good audio equipment, and one day the phone stopped ringing, and nobody in Westminster has yet found the courage to say out loud what actually happened to it, or what they intend to do about it. I didn’t get much of a say in it either, in the end. I just did the sums, at two in the morning, and stayed where the sums worked.

I don’t have a tidy ending for this one. I’ve written enough of these pieces now to know that the tidy ending is usually where the honesty stops. So I’ll leave it where the numbers left me: a man near Newcastle, handing over twenty per cent of his margin to sell into a market that used to be his for nothing, and an old ex-copper in a Spanish cave, still doing the maths on a country he can no longer quite afford to miss.

Until Next Time