Brexit Could Cripple Britain’s Ports

I arrive in Dover, England, on a Thursday evening in late spring, a few hours before sundown. On my left as I emerge from the railway station is a pale cliff face with a castle on top. I go right up Folkestone Road, passing a flurry of guesthouses and allotments. It is golden hour and, apart from some furious seagulls, peaceful and quiet.

You wouldn’t know it from where I’m standing, but Dover is home to the busiest seaport in the United Kingdom. Situated on the southeast tip of England in the county of Kent, it is the nearest British port to France, with the city of Calais a scant 27 miles away. Every year, 2 million lorries pass through this small town on their way to and from the port.

Through the past two bruising years of British politics, Dover has been emblematic of all the chaos that followed the referendum to leave the European Union, a.k.a. Brexit. Described as the “Gateway to England,” the town and its scenery are constantly invoked in rhetoric around borders and national identity. On the day that Article 50 was triggered, the right-wing tabloid The Sun projected a series of messages onto the cliff face, including DOVER AND OUT and SEE EU LATER. The following month, the betting company Paddy Power erected a gigantic effigy of Prime Minister Theresa May on top of the cliffs, wearing a Union Jack and making a V-sign (an offensive gesture in the United Kingdom) out to the continent.

The Port of Dover lurks in the notions of new and emergent digital technologies, which will somehow permit business as usual in Brexit’s brave new world. But most of these promises have been by European politicians as “magical thinking.”