It is one of those occasions when you don’t need to wait for tomorrow’s newspapers to know what will be inside. There will be the usual photographs of empty supermarket shelves, along with the message ‘It’s Brexit wot done it’. Never mind that there are always some gaps on supermarket shelves and that the blockades on French motorways (as that country’s farmers demonstrate their deep commitment to the single market) are bound to impact on some supply chains. The reason for the gaps, it will be asserted, is that from today animal and vegetable products imported to Britain from the EU will require a veterinary certificate. From 30 April consignments will also be subject to physical checks.

Free trade, it seems in many remainers’ eyes, is only a benefit when it is with the EU

Goods travelling in the other direction already have to be checked, and have been since the Brexit transitional arrangements came to an end – what is happening today is that a grace period applied by the UK government has come to an end for EU goods imported to Britain. Food importers have warned that it will introduce yet more friction and add costs for UK consumers – although the projected impact does not seem to be all that great. The government calculates that it will add an extra 0.2 per cent to food price inflation. Given that inflation in the price of fresh food was running at 15 per cent a year ago (for entirely non Brexit-related reasons) and is now down to 5 per cent it is unlikely that shoppers will even notice.

Moreover, the extra costs of importing food from the EU have to be balanced against the chance that they might just end up saving UK farmers a good deal of money if, say, they were used in future to prevent an outbreak of foot and mouth spreading to Britain. If the government were to announce that it was lifting biosecurity measures with non-EU countries there would, of course, be outrage. There would be accusations that the government was throwing our food industry to the wall ‘in a regulatory race to the bottom’. But the imposition of checks on EU goods entering the UK is viewed through a completely different lens – one which invariably leads to the conclusion that Brexit has been a disaster.

It was the same with trade deals. Fall out of the EU without a trade deal and it would a disaster we were told: food would rocket up in price and our farmers would go bankrupt because they would lose the opportunity to export to the EU. Yet the very same people who made that claim have similarly tried to make out that Britain’s trade deal with Australia will be a disaster – because cheap imports will undermine UK farmers. Free trade, it seems in many remainers’ eyes, is only a benefit when it is with the EU. Conduct it with any other countries in the world and it is a perilous attack on our food industry.

As it happens, there are some unsatisfactory things about the new rules. Surely there is room for some kind of UK-EU agreement to leave out checks on most goods and only apply them where there is a genuine biosecurity risk. Moreover, the physical checks will be conducted at the new facility at Sevington, near Ashford, 15 miles up the M20 from the Channel Tunnel. Methinks that customs officials might need to keep a close eye on lay-bys and country parks around the Folkestone area, to check that EU lorries are not offloading goods there. But no, the new regime is not going to spell disaster, even if some diehard remainers will relish the chance to claim that it is.