Brexit added almost £6bn to UK food bills in the two years to the end of 2021, affecting poorest households the most, research has found.
Nikhil Datta, assistant professor of economics at Warwick University and a co-author of the study, said: “The policy implications are stark: non-tariff barriers are an important impediment to trade that should be a first-order concern, at least on a par with tariffs, for policymakers interested in low consumer prices.”
Oh. So this isn’t, in fact, really Brexit at all. It’s the insane insistence on having border checks. Simply declare that anything legal in the EU is also legal in the UK an be done with the lot of it.
You know, free trade?
I’ve always scoffed at the reasons given for global warming, but now I realise Al Gore hadn’t forseen Brexit and therefore Obama’s beloved “consensus” didn’t take it into account.
Well, it would have convinced me!
. . . the insane insistence on having border checks. Simply declare that anything legal in the EU is also legal in the UK an be done with the lot of it.
Wouldn’t you still need to check whether goods coming in are legal in the EU?
“Wouldn’t you still need to check whether goods coming in are legal in the EU?”
Any reason why? And just what credentials does a border official have to do any checks of value to anybody? My encounters with them suggest that they can read, write and count but that’s about all the expertise they have
Any reason why?
Because you’ve declared a standard to be met (EU legality). Unless you mean we just don’t check any goods coming in to the UK?
“BREXSHIT has added £6 Bn to your cost of living :smugface:” – people who want to add £2 Tn to your cost of living.
Border checks are just a paperwork exercise, aren’t they? Does anyone actually physically check anything to confirm it conforms with the paperwork?
“Wouldn’t you still need to check whether goods coming in are legal in the EU?”
This bit has always puzzled me. Why would there be more checks post-Brexit than before for goods coming from the EU? We must have been checking previously that EU goods were meeting the required standards, so what has changed?
We must have had checks, otherwise we would have risked horse meat in pies and illegal VW diesels or whatever. And the EU would not have allowed that.
Border checks are just make work schemes for otherwise unemployable fuckwits.
Like Airport security.
And the Houses of Parliament.
Bis, occasionally there are stories about people found being transported illegally in trucks so the border guardians must open the occasional truck door. The amazing thing is that they are able to discern that the cargo is different from what is on the manifest. That probably counts as going beyond the call of duty
Only problem with this is that the EU food standards look like they’re getting worse than ours, specifically with feeding pigs, etc “animal protein”! That said, when I look at the food I buy, it all comes from the UK .
Did we get to keep the £14Bn per year EU
danegeldcontributions? If so, that equals £200 each or thereabouts.I know we won’t ever see any benefit from ‘cos the cretins in charge will waste it, but still……..
So not cost of increased regulation in the EU, increased energy prices, driving producer prices up at all?
@Diogenes
I did a fair bit of cross Channel commuting & that’s my impression. They open up a few trucks in Grande Synthe if they suspect there may be someone in them. You never saw one being unstuffed to check what’s it. Don’t think they had the facilities to do that. Doverside they roll off the ferry & straight onto the highway. Unless Dover’s changed a great deal since I last went through it, there’s only enough room to cope with the France bound traffic. If they were doing proper border checks, you’d never be able to get off the boat.
As far as passenger vehicles are concerned, I’ve only ever been checked in Dover going out. Regularly. Middle aged white bloke travelling alone. Least problematic to hit the quota. I know that for a fact. Saw the blonde chick so often I had a dinner date with her. She admitted it. Last thing they want to get involved with at 3AM is a car full of tinted with kids. Might find something wrong.
Simply declare that anything legal in the EU is also legal in the UK
Does that include bendy bananas?
(I tried to post a link but it’s not working so I just posted the title of Tim’s article.)
It’s Straight Bananas That Made Me Support Brexit Too —Forbes by Tim Worstall
As an aside, I’m a long time follower and fan of Tim Worstall, which is why I know his writing so well.
Julian Jessop has already pointed out that the £6bn figure is little more than guesswork, based on modelling and hypothetical costs, not actual data. As ever, it has (of course) been deliberately misinterpreted as “proof” by the usual suspects. The fact that the research underpinning Datta’s study was published ages ago (and publicised in exactly the same way at the time – i.e., with hardly any attempt at scrutiny) tells its own story.
Food prices are important for the working class.
We need to ensure UK and European food security.
It is the poor who suffer in famines or in imes of food Insecurity.
I meant to say times of food security not imes of food security.
“Simply declare that anything legal in the EU is also legal in the UK an be done with the lot of it.”
No. That’s not enough. The same HGV that we wave through on entry must eventually leave and the checks entering the EU are something we have no control over (because we “took back control”). A delay at any point in the circular journey adds expense – even if you try to increase the price of exports to cover the added transport cost, this will reduce the volume of exports which increases the number of HGVs which have to leave empty thereby increasing the cost for a journey where we must pay all of it.