Why Brexit made Dover gridlock inevitable

Pure Brexit took effect at 11pm, British time, on 31 December 2020. So why should the decision to leave the European Union suddenly be afflicting travellers who want to return to the EU, albeit temporarily on holiday?

Because this is the first real peak weekend for cross-Channel travellers from Dover since the Brexit transition phase ended.

The Channel crunch would have happened a year ago, were it not for the bizarre “amber plus” decision. This time last July the normal flood of British holidaymakers heading across to France reduced to a trickle as a result of the UK government’s invention of a new mandatory quarantine category for people returning back across the Channel.

Travellers from “amber” nations on the “traffic light” scale, including France, Spain and most of our other European favourites, were set to go quarantine-free as the main school holidays began for families in England and Wales.

But at 4am on 19 July 2021, France was placed in a newly created and short-lived category that required 10 days of self-isolation. Days before what would have been the peak weekend for departures, hundreds of thousands of holidaymakers tore up their plans to head across the Channel.

By the time it emerged that there was no medical merit to amber plus, and that the whole thing had been a hopeless geo-political blunder miscalculation, it was too late for families to remake plans for a French escape.

That fiasco was followed over the Christmas holidays by the “Omicron overreaction” – the strange decision by the French government to wipe out the usual surge of UK skiers to the Alps by placing a scientifically pointless ban on British visitors.

Which is why only now are we able to see clearly the results of the choice that we made in the 2016 EU referendum.

As members of the European Union we helped to draw up the rules for “third-country nationals”. In the withdrawal treaty, ministers asked for us to become subject to those rules.

That is why the hundreds of thousands of passengers flying to Greece, Spain and Italy today will have to spend time queueing up to have their passport stamped.

At the main Channel port, though, immigration controls are “juxtaposed” – they take place before leaving the UK. Police aux Frontières are deployed at Dover to check the passports of British holidaymakers before they board ferries to Calais and Dunkirk

Anyone who left the country in this manner before 1 January 2021 will know that the checks were almost always cursory: someone in the car could hold up passports and the uninterested official would wave the vehicle through.

They have to be interested now though. As the guardians of the EU frontier, they are obliged to check every single passport, and stamp it with the day of departure to France. This is necessary so that officials can ensure travellers do not exceed the 90-day maximum stay in any 180 days – another law we chose to apply to ourselves.

The time taken for each car has increased from a few seconds to a couple of minutes – leading to queues growing with alarming speed.

The first real weekend of contact with the new reality at scale was always going to be this weekend, and it was always going to be a struggle. The only surprise: staffing at the newly expanded French border area so disastrously low that a “critical incident” was declared, while port officials issued an extraordinarily strongly worded statement blaming the French for ruining British holidays.

Relations will be patched up. More staff will be brought in. And by early next week the queues will begin to subside.

But by then yet more damage will have been done to passenger confidence – as well as the inbound tourism industry.

French, Belgian, Dutch and German holidaymakers will note the chaos filling their screens from Dover, and perhaps reconsider the decision to take the family in the car to the UK. Although they have instant access to the EU, they will have to line up on the A2 and A20 for hours along with the rest of us.

At least, as British holidaymakers stew in their cars, they may be able to contemplate the “blue” passport that was presented to us as a Brexit benefit – even though EU members could happily diverge from the burgundy European norm at any time they wished. And the resorts of east Kent may themselves earn a brief Brexit dividend from diverted holidaymakers.