‘Absolute nightmare’: Brexit bellwether constituencies revisited 10 years on

David Milne voted leave to try to save the UK fishing industry – to have more say over what happened in our waters. ‘We was promised that, but that hasn’t happened,’ he says. Composite: Guardian Design View image in fullscreen David Milne voted leave to try to save the UK fishing industry – to have more say over what happened in our waters. ‘We was promised that, but that hasn’t happened,’ he says. Composite: Guardian Design ‘Absolute nightmare’: Brexit bellwether constituencies revisited 10 years on From north-east Scotland to Romford, London, what do those who spoke to the Guardian during the referendum campaign make of how it all panned out? T he Guardian has revisited five bellwether constituencies we reported on during the 2016 EU referendum campaign, and asked those we spoke to at the time how they now feel about Brexit a decade on from the vote. Torridge and West Devon. Voted leave by 57.0% “Absolute nightmare, shambles, and still is to this day,” says Tony Rutherford a decade after he voted leave to save the British fishing industry. Rutherford, who since 1979 has run a business in Appledore, north-west Devon, buying from fishers and selling on to wholesalers, even featured on a Ukip poster. “Nobody is listening. They might listen in June,” he said in 2016. Now he says that Brexit has been a disaster from day one. Under Johnson’s deal, the UK fishing fleet with which Rutherford works achieved barely any increase in fishing opportunities, he ssays. “Sold down the river,” is how Rutherford puts it. Then there were the huge additional export costs from 1 January 2021. He had “folders after folders” of information about what he needed to do ahead of time, but it all proved to be “useless”. Tony Rutherford in 2016 and in 2026 “I believe it was 4 January we shipped £47,000 worth of our first shipment of largely ray and dover sole,” he says. “The first thing you have to do is be VAT registered in France. You cannot export into France without that. You’ve got to employ a French accountant to do that for you. The cost of that is £2,000 a month. That first load was held up for five days.” It was ruined. Under a compensation scheme set up by the government as the disaster unfolded, Rutherford got £11,000 back. “That was our first encounter,” he says. “You have got other costs: you need a health certificate that costs £85 a go. You need a transport company to do the import documents: £245 a go. So every shipment is an extra £330. “If you ship three times a week it is a thousand quid. There are other costs. Bearing in mind we are really a husband-and-wife team, it is £70,000 right out of my back pocket. It is horrendous.” Then there is French customs. “On a health certificate, which is 16 sheets long, you have got eight sheets in English and eight sheets in French,” Rutherford says. “If you miss one digit of a 10-digit code, your whole shipment is condemned the other side. Since Brexit we have lost about eight loads – anything from £15,000 to £50,000.