The markets are already taking care of this:
Calico Cottage is a family-owned firm in Haddenham, Cambridgeshire, making specialist chocolate and fudge in two factories employing 50 people. Nigel Baker, its managing director, is despairing in his attempts to prepare for a no-deal Brexit: Calico exports 20% of its produce to the EU and uses imported raw materials. Trading on World Trade Organisation rules means a 20% tariff will be slapped on to his exports, a price rise he’ll have to absorb: he sells to Disneyland Paris and says customers won’t pay the extra.
The £ will decline by some 20% – in fact, the £ has already declined by 20%.
Oh, and we can also leave this system:
How EU sugar tariffs work
As the UK is currently part of the EU, we’re subject to EU rules. That will change after Brexit, but we don’t yet know how.The rules on sugar tariffs depend on several variables, such as the country of origin of the raw material – sugar cane or sugar beet – who produces it, a mill or refinery, and whether it is for direct consumption or additional refining. Getting it correct is important because getting it wrong can be expensive: tariffs vary between €419 and €90 per tonne.
The basic tariff for importing direct consumption sugar into the EU is €419 per tonne. So, every tonne of sugar imported from a non-EU country costs an extra €419. Raw sugar imported into the EU is to be further refined into white sugar attracts a tariff of €339 per tonne.
Except not every non-EU country pays the above tariffs. The EU also has what it calls its preferential tariff structure. The import duty for raw sugar is only €98 per tonne if imported from a ‘CXL’ country, which includes Australia, Brazil, Cuba and India. But only for sugar destined to be refined into white sugar.
Least Developed Countries (LDC) and African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries trading under Everything but Arms (EBA) have unrestricted, tariff-free imports of raw sugar into the EU.
If things weren’t complicated enough, if a mill outside of the EU is producing raw sugar which it sells as, for example, brown sugar for direct consumption, then it pays the full €419 per tonne tariff.
All to ‘protect’ the ludicrous and pointless growing of sugar beet.
So the scum of the ESpew vindictively slapping tariffs on this bloke’s packed fudge is the fault of those of us who want to be free of EU tyranny? The Japs used to execute 20 prisoners for every one who escaped. Does that make anyone who did escape a multiple murderer? Or is that down to the actual evil rule makers and killers?
Pol–brainless left-sucking bitch as ever–wants us blamed for the EU’ s evil.
Silly cow.
They’ve really messed up that report. The supplier doesn’t pay tarrifs, the consumer does. If Frenchies want to kick Disneyland Paris in the knackers for the crime of buying English tile grout, that’s their business.
Plus, WTO rules is max. 5%, not compulsary 20%.
Chesterton’s Fence question: why were these tariffs applied in the first place? A make-work scheme for Brussels bureaucrats, or just the realpolitik of trying to get 28 countries to agree on something?
And anyway sell the bloody stuff elsewhere, if he’s a decent marketer. Relying on Disneyland is a bit of an accident waiting to happen.
Just been watching a docu on how the EU is wrecking West Africa’s agricultural economy by dumping surplus wheat and onions on them
Project Fear seems desperate. Brexit will hurt a fudge factory . . . oh my!
Calico Cottage is a family-owned firm in Haddenham, Cambridgeshire, making specialist chocolate and fudge
I thought the progressive idea was to run these people out of business with punitive taxation and excessive regulation a la Action On Sugar.
A well made point Steve. Since –as a good Proggie–Pol must hate foul. filthy sugar as consumed by foul, filthy Gaia-raping proles–what is she whining about?
EU tariffs are a mess. Take manioc, for example. It’s a staple of Africa, virtually none is grown in EU. Yet different tariffs apply to: loose or packed, frozen, shrink wrapped, preserved in nitrogen; whole or sliced, raw or cooked, as an ingredient or whole, ready cooked or prepared uncooked meal. Etc., etc.
In addition, tariffs vary depending if the exporting country is very poor or just poor. So an opportunity for corruption is artificially created which only the government officers can exploit.
It’s a specialist chocolatier. Only those prole mass-market chocolate-makers like Cadbury’s should suffer the sugar tax; posh stuff shouldn’t be taxed.
Come to think of it, the sugar taxers missed a trick there. They should have demanded a Minimum Sugar Price, not a % tax, so that their pricey posh chocs wouldn’t suffer.
Ecks – on a related note, you may enjoy this excellent article by Danny Cohen in the Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/aug/13/brexit-remain-radicalisation-fbpe-peoples-vote
Warning: high salt content.
Remainists feel embattled, ignored; they lament what their country has become. They feel that the politicians who are meant to be on their side, and the media organisations that are meant to present facts impartially, have betrayed them. The system that had seemed to function, more or less, has broken down.
You’d need a heart of stone, eh?
There are plenty of remainist groups: one, Wooferendum, even mobilises dogs against Brexit.
My cats, otoh, are patriotic pussies. Make Britain Purr Again!
Most of all, remainists hate the way the Brexiters keep getting away with it. Remainists hated Theresa May by the end; increasingly, they hate Jeremy Corbyn, too.
Good, good! Let the hate flow through you!
“it felt like a particularly bleak moment,” says Jolyon Maugham. In response, he came up with the idea of launching Spring, a new party. “I wanted to find a way for those who felt like I did to stand together and say: ‘This is not who we are,’” he said. His plans were big. He would hold a 28-day festival at the football stadium in Maidenhead, May’s constituency. Each day would be dedicated to the national dress and cuisine of a different EU member state
Sadly there weren’t enough dakishis or burkhas to represent France and Sweden.
And even elderly remainists delight in pointing out that as many as a million leave voters have died since 2016
They’re the tolerant ones, you see.
Adonis defines remainism as a revolt of the middle class – and that is why he believes that, in the end, Brexit won’t happen. “The English middle class, deeply alarmed, will be heard and will win,” he told me. “That’s my whole experience of politics.”
That certainly is his experience. Class politics never went away, the working and lower middle classes just got gradually disenfranchised by a political establishment that despises them. Hence Brexit, Trump and populism.
Afterwards, a protester told me that when she had drawn tarot cards, they showed that Britain would stay in the EU. But it wasn’t certain. “I did that six months ago,” she said. “Energies can change.”
Lol.
‘Slapped’ on imports not exports!
Options.
Meet with EU importers to reduce effect of import tariff of 20% by sharing burden.
Divert production to supply domestic market.
Find new export markets outside EU. Should have been onto that three years ago.
And… is a specialist product so price sensitive? Specialist product have high margins, so live with lower margin.
“That certainly is his experience. Class politics never went away, the working and lower middle classes just got gradually disenfranchised by a political establishment that despises them. Hence Brexit, Trump and populism.”
There was an excellent guy on Twitter, a solicitor from the Manchester area, who used to taunt #fbpe ‘ers as class hating snobs. He was also very good on all the legal details, which they hated.
The haters seem to have got him banned.
Andrew M,
Cadbury’s still make chocolate?
I learn something new every day.
BiND – In my experience, it doesn’t matter how politely you mock progressives on social media, they’re incredibly sensitive to being challenged and Big Tech is only too happy to ban wrongthinkers.
Nota Benny (from Crossroads) Adonis is a Labour peer, openly calling for class struggle against… the working class.
Steve,
I’m not really sure what the boundaries of classes are any longer, but the problem that the institutional class has is that the rest of the public don’t trust them any longer, and the institutional class isn’t big enough to defeat the people.
Why are EU tariffs so complicated? Because there is a surfeit of graduate level wonks gagging for tax free pensionable employment with expensed foreign travel and exotic prostitutes.
At each stop they negotiate with a small cadre of men qualified largely by nepotism.
This is not a level playing field.
If we got rid of all our negotiators we would not only promote trade, we would liberate some third world graduates to do something potentially useful.
Or we could (a faint hope) bring agricultural trade under WTO.
Wooferendum? Tarot cards?
#FBPE is a symptom.
“Class politics never went away, the working and lower middle classes just got gradually disenfranchised by a political establishment that despises them. Hence Brexit, Trump and populism.”
I first understood this some years ago when I realised that the bien pensant hatred for the likes of Tesco, Sky, McDonalds, Starbucks etc (in the days before the internet FANGs took over this role) was a facade for a hatred of the people who spend their money at those establishments. For example it wasn’t that they hated supermarkets per se, as Waitrose and M&S weren’t demonised, as (of course) the haters shopped there themselves. The difference was the customers only. Anywhere that became popular because they managed to attract the mass market was attacked unmercilessly, precisely because of its popularity.
This of course was in the days when the Left still had to pretend in public that they were ‘working class’ themselves. Openly deriding the poor and uneducated was still considered beyond the pale. Its taken Brexit to lift the veil on the Lefts true feelings, which is another thing we can thank it for.
BoM4
“I’m not really sure what the boundaries of classes are any longer, but the problem that the institutional class has is that the rest of the public don’t trust them any longer, and the institutional class isn’t big enough to defeat the people.”
I have been thinking lately the Tory party has always represented those who were doing well enough with things as they are, be it royalists, or landowners, or industrialists…; now it is the ‘institutional class’, no wonder they just labour in blue clothing.
“The problem that the institutional class has is that the rest of the public don’t trust them any longer, and the institutional class isn’t big enough to defeat the people.”
I think thats one of the reasons they are SO desperate to nix Brexit – they realise its the crack in the dam. If the masses get the idea they can change things by voting for them, where will it end?
@philip August 13, 2019 at 12:28 pm
Re manioc
A new word/food, thanks
https://www.thekitchn.com/a-staple-starch-cassava-manioc-yuca-ingredient-spotlight-176111
Manioc = cassava = sago = frog-spawn pud.
@Steve
Adonis is a Labour peer, openly calling for class struggle against… the working class
Labour hate the working class. LibDems are neither liberal nor democratic. Party names are simply window dressing.
Remain is basically continuity Blairism. They have been in power since 1997 just sailing under different flags of convenience. Now Boris has ejected them from Blu Labour they are torn between taking over the Lib Dem’s or re-infesting the Labour Party by staging a coup against Corbyn.