The first shipment was £47,000 worth of ray and Dover sole, exported to France on 4 January 2021 by Tony Rutherford’s business in Appledore, north-west Devon. It was held up for five days. By the time it cleared customs, the fish was ruined. The government’s compensation scheme gave Rutherford £11,000 back. But the costs kept coming: a French accountant at £2,000 a month, health certificates at £85 a go, import documents at £245 a shipment – an extra £330 every time. “We are really a husband-and-wife team, it is £70,000 right out of my back pocket. It is horrendous,” he says. Since Brexit, he has lost about eight loads, worth anything from £15,000 to £50,000 each, because of a single digit wrong on a 16-page health certificate written in English and French.
Rutherford voted leave in 2016 to save the British fishing industry. He even featured on a Ukip poster back then, telling the Guardian at the time: “Nobody is listening. They might listen in June.” A decade on, he calls Brexit an “absolute nightmare, shambles, and still is to this day”. Under Boris Johnson’s deal, the UK fishing fleet achieved barely any increase in fishing opportunities. “Sold down the river,” he says.
“Brexit fishermen say they were 'sold down the river' as export costs and ruined shipments devastate livelihoods a decade on.”
Up in north-east Scotland, David Milne also voted leave to gain more control over UK waters. “We was promised that, but that hasn’t happened,” he says.
The sense of betrayal echoes beyond the fishing towns. Writing in the Guardian, Fintan O’Toole, a columnist with the Irish Times and author of *Heroic Failure: Brexit and the politics of pain*, recalls how different things looked in May 2011, when Queen Elizabeth made a four-day state visit to Ireland – the first by a reigning British monarch in almost exactly a century. It felt like an exorcism, he writes, “the ghosts of a colonial past were banished”. The close cooperation forged in the Northern Ireland peace process and through shared European Union membership made that possible. Then came the shock of Brexit. For Brexit’s true believers, O’Toole argues, “Ireland will always be the spoke in the wheel”. But the human cost, for people like Rutherford and Milne, has been devastating – and the promises of freedom and prosperity remain unfulfilled.