Separate weighs: Brexit, one year on

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Covid restrictions have come and gone in many jurisdictions, but for one group, freedom still seems distant, clinically vulnerable. Our correspondent shares a personal view on living with risks that never subside. And Singapore was once a hodgepodge of rural villages. Now, among the skyscrapers, just one of them remains. We pay a visit to the woman who owns and runs it, asking what will be lost if it too is swallowed. But first, back on Christmas Eve of 2020, Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson hailed a last minute trade and cooperation agreement with the European Union. A hard won Brexit deal.

And so I'm very pleased to tell you this afternoon that we have completed a comprehensive Canada style free trade deal between the UK and the eu.

He made big promises of easy trade with the bloc without tariffs or non tariff barriers. Having cake in his famed phraseology, and eating it.

A deal which will, if anything, allow our companies and our exporters to do even more business with our European friends.

Mr. Johnson assured the public that the arrangement came with low costs. Britain could set standards for the benefit of its own businesses.

We've taken back control of our laws and our destiny. We've taken back control of every jot and tittle of our regulation in a way that is complete and unfettered on.

The EU side of the table. There was a little less enthusiasm at.

The end of a successful negotiations journey. I normally feel joy, but today I only feel quite satisfaction and frankly speaking, relief.

The deal took effect just a week later. The Brexit debate divided political parties, communities, even families. Now a year on from Britain leaving Europe's institutions almost two years from its formal exit from the eu, how has Brexit changed Britain?

There is no question that Britain's relationship with the EU has fundamentally changed over the past year since Britain effectively left the Customs Union and the single market.

Sumaya Keynes is our Britain Economics editor.

The complication when trying to identify how exactly Brexit has changed Britain is that obviously Brexit happened at the same time as lots of other things. Most obviously the pandemic that affected flows of goods, services, people across borders. And so now you have to work really hard to disentangle everything that's not to be too extreme. I think we can start to read the results of how exactly this process has been playing out and its effects on Britain.

Well, let's start with that question of trade though, because that was one of the touted great benefits that Britain would get from being out of the EU's regulatory orbit. How have things shaped up in this interim?

Yeah, there is definitely a lot more friction at the border, particularly for stuff going from Britain to the eu.

So.

So Boris Johnson's claim that this is going to lead to no tariff or non tariff barriers is just wrong. So examples of the new things that products have to face when crossing borders, new sanitary checks, there are important export declarations. Products have to satisfy these things called rules of origin. In general, obviously there are lots of supply chain disruptions going on around the world. So if you've noticed that stuff is taking longer to arrive, goods shortages, that sort of thing, that's not necessarily because of Brexit. And there's a big global issue there. So, you know, with that caveat that it's just quite difficult to disentangle things, one can say that so far it looks like Brexit has depressed trade in goods with the eu. Various think tanks have looked at this. There's been some careful analysis that suggests that if you combine imports and exports to the world, Britain's overall Trade is between 11 and 16% lower than it would have been without Brexit. That's since the beginning of 2021.

So that's the situation with goods, but Britain's is also of course, a service economy. How has that looked?

Not great. Services really were not covered very well at all by the deal that Boris Johnson agreed with the EU back in December of 2020. There are some estimates from the UK Trade Policy Observatory, the think tank, that suggest that trade in services has probably been hit harder than trading goods. And that's even trying to compare Britain to other countries, which should really control for things like the pandemic. In some sectors, the issue is trade barriers. There are new visa requirements for people working in the UK or traveling to the eu. There are British qualifications such as architecture, accountancy, auditing, that are no longer recognised in the eu. In other areas, the problem is uncertainty, temporary arrangements that could end quite quickly. So one example is data. Data is currently allowed to flow freely between Britain and the eu, but that could be scrapped at any time. So that's quite tricky for companies to deal with and effectively as a trade barrier.

But what about financial services specifically? There was a great concern that London as a financial centre would crumble in the face of Brexit.

Yeah.

And if you look at what happened in the immediate aftermath of Britain leaving the single market and customs union, it's hard to see a big implos and that's really because financial institutions anticipated that the deal was just not going to cover them. And so there were lots of moving of activities. And so really instead of an explosion or a big pop, it's been more of a slow puncture where the City of London is increasingly being sidelined or overtaken. Just to give an example, Amsterdam is taking over from the City as the trading capital for the European shares. If you look at the export figures and just compare the second quarters of 2019 and 2021, financial services exports to the EU fell by 30%. That's a lot.

And what about public opinion in a general sense? This was of course, an extremely divisive question from the very start.

On the question of whether Britain should be in or out of the eu, those divisions are still pretty apparent. Britain is still pretty polarized. If you think that in 2016, 48% of the British voting public voted to remain. Today's polling suggests that that number wouldn't be that much change, it'd be about 51%. But Brexit does seem to be softening as an issue, partly because people just aren't thinking about it as much. So again, if you look at polling, Brexit was the number one or number two most important issue facing the country between 2016 and 2019. Then in 2020 Covid took over and since then, Brexit has been edged out by the economy and the environment. So the salience of the issue has gone down a bit.

So the people of Britain are talking about it less, but it's still an issue that continues to have a big impact on their lives.

I mean, you know, obviously, however much the government would like it to be the case, Brexit is not done. It's this long process and things are not stable. Things could change. I think, obviously, thinking about the general Brexit issue, looking at the next few months, in the nearer term, the really major headache is going to be over Northern Ireland, which is obviously a very politically charged topic. Essentially, it remained in the Single Market and Customs Union, for practical purposes, that was to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland. But now politicians are arguing over those arrangements, saying that there needs to be a renegotiation of them. And you've got elections coming up in Northern Ireland. But also just looking generally at the politics, the negotiating stances, the public rhetoric between the UK and the eu, I would worry that some of this calmness or this softening could reverse over the next few months.

Somaya, thanks very much for joining us.

Thanks so much for having me.

In England alone, there are 3.7 million people like me who are identified as clinically extremely vulnerable. I'm among that list because I have Crohn's disease.

Kevin Young is the Economist's head of audience. He's been writing about his own experience of the pandemic.

My mother died from cancer about five days before the UK's lockdown was introduced. That was 23 March, the famous date in 2020 when Boris Johnson announced it. I'd spent the entire winter really moving between hospital wards, intensive care units and care homes. I was even admitted to hospital myself for a couple of nights, having contracted norovirus somewhere along the way. And suddenly, when the lockdown was announced, I had to focus on my own health. I was told by my specialist that if norovirus had landed me in hospital, there was no way that I wanted to contract COVID 19, when so little was known about it. I have to inject myself with a prescribed drug. It kills off a lot of the good cells in the process of eliminating the bad ones. So that means I'm immunocompromised and at far higher risk of serious illness than the general population. I was classed as clinically extremely vulnerable and shielding. And for me, that meant I had to stay at home as much as possible. I Had to go shopping only in the early morning if I really had to arrange deliveries, if not, and stay away completely from other people. The government initially asked us to shield for 12 weeks, but actually it's been a lot longer than that. On a typical day, I'll go for a walk around about 7am and I might pop into the supermarket to pick up some supplies then. And then I won't go out for the rest of the day because it's just too busy. And that's what life has been looking like really for me for the last 21 months. When society started to reopen in the summer of 2020, buses and trains and restaurants and pubs and shops were packed and people seemed to be getting back to everyday life. But for the vulnerable, the threat was no less than it had been before at a time when there was still very, very little solid information about the long term impact of COVID 19. And I found that very, very difficult to cope with at times. So for me, shielding continued not just through the summer, but also into the autumn and the winter. There were lockdowns and other restrictions and I had to avoid even close family members over Christmas. Then along came Freedom Day.

Happy Freedom Day.

Now in England, nightclubs are reopening and mask mandates and social distancing rules are.

Ending in what's been dubbed Freedom Day.

Masks and other restrictions remained in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. But in England, July 19 was the sign of mandatory measures being lifted and people no longer having to wear masks. Cases rose steadily over the summer and that caused high anxiety for the vulnerable. And in fact, by the middle of October, when the Office for National Statistics conducted a survey, 22% of the clinically vulnerable in England, that's more than 800,000 people, were still shielding. I think the levels of communication from the government have been inconsistent during the pandemic. At the beginning, we were receiving regular letters from ministers saying, this is what you should do, this is what you should avoid. Towards the end of the summer of 2021, the term clinically extremely vulnerable was actually dropped by the government in England and shielding was scrapped around the UK. So having been told for 18 months that we should take huge amounts of care, we were suddenly advised to follow the same guidance as the rest of the population. And the guidance said you should avoid anybody who hasn't been fully vaccinated. But how could we tell the vaccination stat with anybody we didn't know? So there was a feeling that this guidance wasn't really a great deal of help.

We have been considering a booster vaccine. And today we have received interim advice.

From JCVI and they back our plans.

Which are to roll it out From September. When boosters were introduced in the autumn, we were separated into a different group from the wider population. So the clinically extremely vulnerable patients would be given a third primary dose and it was to be eight weeks after our second jab. The wider population would a single booster dose. There was a lot of confusion about this and I was actually told that I needed to wait six months for my jab instead of eight weeks, and I had to fight with my local NHS clinical group to be on the correct list. For people like me, it's very hard to tell whether a vaccination will have any effect. I think a lot of people don't realise that they could be standing next to a clinically extremely vulnerable patient in a shop or on a bus. Anybody who's been jabbed can still transmit the virus and potentially make me seriously ill. The Health Secretary, Sajid Javid, says scientists.

Are deeply concerned about a new variant.

Of coronavirus that's been discovered in South Africa. As yet, it has. Over the autumn and the winter, I've sometimes felt like I was in a minority, really. I kept on telling people the pandemic wasn't over and the risks to my health were as marked as ever. And the arrival of Omicron has been, I suppose, a bit of an I told you so moment, although I genuinely don't derive pleasure from that. We have lots of headlines about people being scared that they'll catch the new variant or they're suddenly having to miss out on Christmas parties or office events or school things at this time of year. But this is how I felt for the past 21 months and how millions of others who are clinically vulnerable have as well. At the moment, I don't see a way out of the pandemic for me. I'm an optimist by nature, and so I imagine that the spring and the summer will make society feel safer for me and that I'll be more comfortable in associating with people, perhaps if I'm wearing a mask, and I should have had my fourth jab by then, so hopefully I will have some degree of protection, but there'll be another winter after that, and it's really not clear at the moment what will happen next week, let alone next year. And so it's very, very difficult for me to understand what life beyond the pandemic looks like.

Singapore is known for being a spotless metropolis, but before it was a gleaming sea of high rises. The city state was full of little rural villages. Our Southeast asia correspondent, Charlie McCann found herself wandering down one street and stepping back in time.

Kampong Lurong Buangkok is this little patch of land in the east of Singapore about the size of three football pitches. When I first arrived there, I didn't really know where I was going. And as I was walking down this street, I began to get the distance distinct impression that I was somehow leaving Singapore. I began to see these flower pots lined up in this kind of higgledy piggledy fashion and little patches of jungle that grew quite thick, you know, I like to think almost as thick maybe as when Singapore was just a little fishing village.

And what is life like in that village?

It's peaceful. The sounds of the city sort of seemed to melt away all of a sudden. I could start to hear the chatter of the burps of frogs. And it helps, of course, that the rent is so cheap. The landlady charges anywhere between 5 and 25 US dollars a month. And this is one of the most expensive cities in the world. I spoke with a landlady. Her name is Sun Hui Hong. She and her three siblings own the land and she has lived here ever since she was 4 years old. She described growing up in this place. It was, you know, a kind of community where everybody knew everybody else. Residents left their doors unlocked. Villagers would, you know, gossip over tea or just help each other out with chores. And that still happens to this day.

It really sounds like a place out of time.

It completely is. It's this throwback to a period of time, maybe about 70 years ago, when most people in Singapore lived in villages just like this. You know, when Ms. Seung was a child, more than 2/3 of Singaporeans lived in kampongs. But this is the last kampong standing on the mainland. And that is because early in the history of the independent city state, the government, you know, realizing that this country is tiny and is deeply landscarce, it decided that rather than allowing people to live in villages, it was going to rehouse them in skyscrapers.

These multi story buildings represent a considerable investment, investment in Singapore's future.

And in 1966 it passed a law that allowed the state to requisition land if it deemed it in the public interest. In the early days of this resettlement program, it was deeply controversial. These were people whose lives were grounded in their communities and in their villages. There are tales of farmers herding their pigs up the stairs to their new government flats because they didn't know what to do without their livestock. But gradually, people got on board with this program.

You'll see very few beggars on the streets, but you'll see plenty of new cars.

The village was not immune. The government began taking land away. It came once in the 70s and again in the 80s and took, in total, half the land. And it was revealed in 2014 that it intends to take all of it.

But presumably in a place as expensive as Singapore is, when the government takes that land, she'll at least get a pretty penny for it.

Yes, when the government requisitions land, it pays market value for that land. And at the same time, private buyers have expressed interest in buying the property. In 2007, the land was valued at 33 million Singaporean dollars, or nearly 22 million USD at the time. But she just can't imagine living anywhere else. And a lot of that's down to her devotion to her father. He bought the land in the 50s. But, you know, another reason that she spurns the money is that Ms. Sung just likes her life in this community. She and the community in the village exemplify what's known as the kampong spirit, which refers to the trust and the neighborliness born of living in a place like this.

So it sounds as if Ms. Sung is an immovable object on this point. But how irresistible is the force of the government? Is there a chance that they would just let this last kampong stand?

Unfortunately, I think it's very unlikely. All it will say is that it won't take the village for several decades. The village has attracted a lot of publicity recently. You know, it's become a tourist attraction in recent years for Singaporeans eager to experience a little bit of the city state's past. The government remains immovable. But Ms. Tsung, in sort of characteristic fashion, says that she won't worry about this until she absolutely has to. So until the day that the diggers come, the kampong spirit will live on in Kampong. Lurang Buangkok.

Thanks very much for your time, Charlie.

Thank you, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, leave us a rating and a review and you can subscribe to the economist@examiner.com intelligenceoffer. The link is in the show notes. See you back here tomorrow, Sam.