Kent Brexit 'border' suggestion greeted with anger and criticism

A leading figure in Britain's road haulage industry has dismissed the suggestion lorry drivers seeking to reach mainland Europe through England's channel ports will need a special permit to enter Kent from the end of this year as a "tick box exercise "and pointless.

Michael Gove, the Cabinet minister charged with drawing up contingency plans for the United Kingdom failing to come to an agreement with the European Union before the post-Brexit transition period ends, said on Wednesday that a special Kent Access Permit would be needed, and warned of a worst-case scenario of queues of up to 7,000 vehicles, taking two days to cross the English Channel.

But Duncan Buchanan, policy director of the Road Haulage Association, said that having been involved in try-outs of the system, it was a waste of time.

"It's not an effective system to actually guarantee or ensure that someone is ready to cross the border," he said. "It doesn't do that. It is just a logging system for someone to say 'I am going to the port and I promise I'm ready'."

He called the system "super basic "and said that on the plus side, the bureaucracy involved is negligible, but so is its function. "The entire system is pointless and probably counterproductive," he added.

The prospect of staunchly pro-Brexit Kent effectively finding itself being treated as separate from the rest of the country, almost behind its own border, and the reaction this has drawn, has been greeted with black humor by many who voted against Britain leaving the EU in the 2016 referendum.

Of Kent's 17 members of Parliament, all but one are from the Conservative Party, and out of the county's 13 regions, 12 voted in favor of leaving at the referendum, with support for the move across the whole county being 59 percent.

At the time, leading Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage, who lives in Kent, said the date would "go down in our history as our Independence Day" and told supporters "dare to dream that the dawn is breaking on an independent United Kingdom".

But he has greeted the news of Kent's potential isolation with fury, saying "Not only an internal border with Northern Ireland but now Kent too. Is this the worst government ever?"

Meanwhile, a survey by the British Chambers of Commerce, or BCC, has revealed only half of companies in the UK that trade with Europe have carried out any sort of risk assessment as to how their business will be affected by Brexit.

When he revealed details of the potential impact of Brexit on businesses earlier this week, Gove was quick to say that it was their responsibility to prepare for the end of the transition period, or risk the consequences.

But BCC Director General Adam Marshall has said "significant unanswered questions" remain, and that the government urgently needed to "ramp up engagement with business", adding that companies were being affected by what he called "deadline fatigue".