Nothing much has changed. At least that is the view from sitting in lockdown in my flat in West London, as winter gives way to the first stirrings of spring.
My local supermarkets (in London, not Belfast) still have a decent supply of fresh fruit and vegetables from Spain. There’s been no need to modify my winter tangerine- or broccoli-buying habits. There are not obviously any more “out-of-stock” signs now than pre-Brexit or pre-pandemic. I haven’t tried to order anything online since Christmas, so for me at least, nothing’s gone awry there. Walking around the park, there still seem to be substantial numbers of EU citizens who haven’t joined the exodus from London. My brother got a blue-black passport when he renewed his old burgundy one, though he hasn’t had a chance to use it yet.
Casting my eyes up from my flat, some of the starkest problems that we were warned could arise have not come to pass. The 7,000 lorries backed up in Kent, a possibility laid out in Michael Gove’s “reasonable worst case scenario” last autumn, have not dominated our screens. The only time there were any newsworthy logjams was when we were still in the EU single market, in December, and those were seemingly due to a combination of pre-end-of-transition stockpiling and the French border closure, which was down to the new Covid variant rather than our breach from the EU. In one sense, Brexit proved handy: thanks to earlier fears of a disorderly no-deal departure, we had some overspill lorry parks prepared.