mong thousands of lorries crossing the Irish Sea each day, I spotted Manfreight’s orange livery on the Birkenhead to Belfast ferry. Carrying just-in-time deliveries of short shelf-life food or Amazon parcels, they have just four more months of carefree border-crossing before the Brexit shutter slams. “Over my dead body” will there be an Irish Sea trade border, Boris Johnson proclaimed this month with breathtaking mendacity. That’s the protocol he signed, the international treaty all his MPs voted for; no wriggling out now. Crossing the Irish Sea will require still-unbuilt checkpoints at ports; lorry parks; voluminous customs declarations; veterinary checks; and tariffs to be paid and reclaimed, with 50,000 extra customs officers as yet unrecruited. From his office in Craigavon, County Armagh, Chris Slowey of Manfreight watches the EU negotiations appalled, preparing for avalanches of paperwork. Since his father founded the company 45 years ago, inside the then European Economic Community, “we’ve had no experience whatever of customs”. He runs through just some of the certificates required for every trip his 200 lorries will take, “the weight and cost of every item; the number of pallets; all ingredients and their origins for maybe 3,000 different products. If you’re a few cases short when you arrive, everything is rechecked.” He can hardly believe the madness of it. The Brexiters’ claim to escape “Brussels red tape” has created this instead – even with a deal, let alone without. Showing me round, Slowey talks of lettuces: “They come from Spain. We add more from Spalding, bring them to Northern Ireland where they add carrots. After processing, washing and bagging we take them back to GB supermarkets.” Why these long lettuce journeys? “Food processing is a Northern Ireland mainstay, we’re very expert. But customs, tariffs and delays will see that work shift to Scotland.” He talked of quiches: just one item collected from Kerry foods in Ireland, trucked to a Leeds supermarket, will need three vet checks for the ham, milk and eggs, each costing up to £50, and there’s a vet shortage. All this risks tipping food companies into unprofitability, warns Prof Katy Hayward of Queens University Belfast, with mainland British businesses abandoning the region, raising prices. As for promised whizz-bang hi-tech electronic certification of trusted trader lorries far away from borders: “It doesn’t exist anywhere – and how good are we at track and trace technology?” The government belatedly announced money for a trader support service to aid customs for small companies: not nearly enough, says Slowey. That afternoon a food-processing customer called to say the company was closing for now, after an outbreak of Covid-19. Will they still pay for Manfreight’s contract? “No, it’s all pay as you go.” The virus takes its toll everywhere. Road haulage is a tough business, with a nationwide shortage of drivers. Slowey trains his own, who stay, but conditions on British roads are disgusting for drivers: poor facilities, often nowhere to sleep, filthy lay-bys, no toilets, services in the wrong places; an industry utterly neglected by the state despite everything that depends on road freight. “We kept the shops stocked – they are key workers,” he says of his drivers. Waiting for the Brexit outcome, tariffs will matter: Manfreight buys 40 new Volvo lorries a year from Europe and no deal will mean a 10% duty of £12,000 each, almost half a million pounds in total. Another un-negotiated item is cabotage – the right of one country’s trucks to pick up goods in another on their way home. No deal means huge extra costs, with empty trucks belching diesel fumes across Europe. So it was more bad news that day when UK/EU negotiations broke down acrimoniously. Michel Barnier, the EU negotiator, announced an agreement was now “unlikely” as he toured the 27 EU states warning them to prepare for no deal. There was “no progress whatsoever” on the old obstacles – fisheries, state aid, a level playing field, and environmental and social standards. If there is a typical EU 11th-hour fix, it will be a thin unfriendly deal, which Hayward warns will still mean massive border disruption. The EU will still need to stop around 5,000 goods entering via Ireland, to stop unfair competition as the UK has lowered tariffs. Slowey thinks few companies are ready for the Brexit shock. “They all jumped last time, some filling warehouses with product that went out of date. So this time everyone’s waiting. You can’t prepare when no one knows what the rules will be.” In a world where people running businesses wait for unknowable regulations, “taking back control” has no meaning. Brexiters promised “access to the single market”, Johnson’s “oven-ready deal” the “easiest in human history” , with no “sudden change that disrupts the economy” – and even that “wages will be higher for working people outside the EU” . None of that was true. Nor could any deal be Brexity enough for the fanatics, who are bound to brand it Brino (Brexit in name only). Iain Duncan Smith now rejects the withdrawal agreement he backed, as Nigel Farage licks his lips. He claims he only stood down his 317 Brexit party candidates because Johnson promised no Brexit concessions. Johnson is faced with either a deal that risks Farage becoming resurgent across red wall seats or no-deal chaos at the ports filling the TV news. Labour needs Brexit to be a dead issue by the next election, though EU relations would turn quietly reconstructive under a Starmer government. Meanwhile, as the politics of deal or no deal hang in the air, every likely result will be hard on UK freight, on manufacturers and services everywhere, whose protests go unheard in Westminster. • Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist • Join Guardian journalists for a live event on Wednesday 9 September at 7pm: Are we heading for a no-deal Brexit? With four months to go before the end of the transition period, will we crash out without a deal?