It is bad enough that Brexiteers seem to have adopted the old Millwall slogan, "no one likes us, we don't care". There is something to be said for the return to the conditions of the 1940s that the hard core yearn for, in that the reduced sugar and meat diet of post-war rationing would do wonders for our physical well-being. (I remember what it was like, so I could cope; I wonder how many of those who happily trumpet "we survived the war, we can manage Brexit" could do the same.) But in dragging the UK down, they are taking our friendliest neighbours with us.
The obvious case is that of the island of Ireland where both rail transport and power supply have become so integrated that even under the May-Barnier withdrawal agreement financial rearrangement is going to be costly, introduce duplication and inevitably cost the public.
Denmark and the Netherlands are also affected. In both cases, agriculture plays a large part of trade between our nations, and agriculture attracts the highest tariffs. Our economic is more similar to the Netherlands than to other European nations, with the result that bi-national working by Unilever and Royal Dutch Shell (to quote the largest examples) has been easy.
The Dutch have for long been the friendliest of European neighbours. (They even lent us a king, once.) We have a similar wry sense of humour and I have yet to meet a Dutchman who did not speak beautiful English. There is also a lot of trade between us.
Beyond the trade in goods and services, another difficulty is raised by Brexit. Under EU rules, medicines and medical appliances gaining CE approval in one EU state are certified for use in the other 27. That has enabled the reduction of bureaucracy which will have to be reintroduced. Unless we get a trade deal, and a very soft one at that, there will also be shortages when we actually leave.
As revealed in Liberal Democrat Voice, Dutch health minister Bruno Bruins reported to his parliament "that after checking all UK-sourced supplies, health people have identified at least 50 products that cannot be sourced anywhere else; and that 50 are the products that are vital in treating life-threatening diseases and conditions, hundreds more are crucial but not life-threatening. It turns out that plenty of US producers have used UK registration for the EU market; all those products would lose that registration in case of a No Deal Brexit (the outcome British hard-line Brexiteers await the best of all worlds from; they’ll settle for nothing less).
"Up to 20 years ago, Dutch high street pharmacies (both family shops and affiliates of brand chains) still had the ability to produce equivalent medicines if the imported supply got interrupted; but that ability and those back-room workshops have almost totally disappeared. So if the import from or via the UK gets interrupted, patients are cut off immediately without a possibility of a domestic surrogate."
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