The first challenge they will bequeath to Labour, should it win, involves untying the tangled knot around imports and exports. The confused introduction of hyper-bureaucratic and horrendously expensive border checks is the result of hardcore Brexit ideology.
It’s the EU that demands the hyperbureaucracy.
We can do whatever we want – and we should. One useful idea is that if we were in the EU then we’d accept German, French, Italian, inspection as being valid. So, why not do so when we’re out of the EU?
But then of course we’ve got cretins like Jay Rayner.
But that would have stopped us doing terrible deals with other countries of the sort the EU would not allow. It’s why many UK products are now marked “Not for EU”. It isn’t that they don’t currently comply with EU standards; it’s that theoretically they may not. If an incoming Labour government negotiated alignment on food standards, huge costs and bureaucracy would be stripped out of food production. Imports could flow. With our self-sufficiency at just 60% and falling, that would be a very good thing. We need them.
Who so desperately confuse the EU’s rules on our exports with our rules on imports. They really, really, do not have to be the same.
Another one of them Things:
I believe they tried something like that in the ol’ USSR. And see where that got them…
It’s the EU that demands the hyperbureaucracy
Yes. Another fact msm refuse to mention, even Mail & Telegraph. However, the fault rests with “I voted Leave” Sunak, yeh and pigs can fly. His sellout to EU in Windsor Framework caused this
If we don’t check imports from the single market, including Northen Ireland, EU will fine us. Remainers joyful, yet they want to rejoin single market that EU says provides goods so deadly we must inspect them
Sunak should be jailed for treason
With our self-sufficiency at just 60% and falling
Jay Raynor confirming he knows nothing about food, again.
We haven’t been self-sufficient in food for a long, long time. The last period was possibly in the middle-ages, but certainly we were in the pre-Roman period.
I’m probably well out of date on this, so it may no longer be true. I used to have a mate who worked for MAFF (now something else obvs) after he retired as Detective Chief Super in the murder squad in the Met. He told me that the big problem in the EU was that nobody inspected the meat, they merely stuck a label on it saying “safe to eat” or something like that. One of his last jobs was cracking a racket operating out of South London selling some shit “imported” from the EU as beef. Knowing the UK government we’ve probably kept to the rigorous standards of the EU to facilitate rejoining, so God knows what we’re all eating now. Fortunately, we have MacDonalds, unintentionally boosting our natural immunity…
@Jonathan Not even pre-Roman.. The Isles did not have enough salt, and there’s evidence of trade for salt from the late Stone Age onward.
A lot of it came from the bit of Clogland I live in, and is the cause for the archeological gap of near 600 years in these parts: Sea level rise and low, weak dikes don’t go well together. Especially when you dig up salt peat right up to those dikes…
It was also the reason the Romans really wanted that area. And in the end caused that particular flooding.
Our medieval forebears made more or less the same mistake, for the same reason, some 800 years later, turning my current abode into an island.
Now most people don’t consider salt “food”, but it’s crucial in food preservation, especially the pork-based staple we know the peeps who built the Henges had.
Oh, and you die without it.
A little piece of anecdata. I recently had to order a thing. Doesn’t matter what it was. The only supplier in Europe (including the UK) is in the Netherlands. I was only informed after going through all the rigmarole of the order, entering all my details, that “Please note that since Brexit we cannot ship orders totalling less than €250 to the UK”.
The thing is made in Taiwan. So I went to the manufacturer’s website. The price was the same. Shipping was, astonishingly, the same. It arrived within a week.
Yes, it’s them, not us.
On the importance of salt, the potato famine might have been a serious but manageable problem if it had been cheap and available –
By contrast, Ireland lacked the quality of curing and, despite bounties, high tariffs on salt made attempts at improving curing for commercial fishing difficult. Mr. Curwen, M.P., argued in Parliament that “The complete repeal of the salt duties ought to take place, were it only for the sake of Ireland. …. Let this tax be repealed, and the same would be the case in the south, and every man might then have a herring to his potatoe.—If the salt duties were abolished, where we now drew one million from the sea, we might draw many millions.” (Curwen 1822)
Curwen was the MP for the area that included the Dingle Peninsula. I only stumbled across this quote when an unrelated search result mentioned the substantial number of idle hookers in the area, smiles.
@ Grikath.
One of the reasons the Romans invaded Britain, apart from the copper, tin and gold, was because the Britons were really good farmers, who exported tens of thousands of tons of grain and thousands of cattle to the Roman Empire every year. I’d guess they could only do that if they produced massive surpluses.
Oh, and salt of course…
Sam @ 8.55, it is them but it is also ‘us’.
Not us, but the ‘us’ who wanted to remain in the EU. The ‘us’ who infest every government department / level of bureaucracy and the ‘us’ who are determined to make everything as difficult as they possibly can.
I’ve often thought as Tim – If Kraut wine met the standards when we were in the EU and those standards haven’t changed, why check stuff at the border?
Because ‘us’ wants to show us we were wrong to vote leave.
Imports could flow. With our self-sufficiency at just 60% and falling, that would be a very good thing.
It’s tough for British farmers to compete with foreign, due to the rules which Brits must follow but foreigners can ignore/cheat. It doesn’t help that the Net Zero-obsessed government subsidises not farming. Although apparently Net Zero doesn’t count when it comes to the transportation of food.
@Grist – that’s why you should buy meat from a reputable butcher and never anything marked ‘halal’.
Marius: what’s your best example of a rule which a foreign producer can ignore/cheat but which a UK farmland owner has to stick to?
I mean you watch Clarkson’s farm and he can’t get a cafe built, or pay a consenting labourer between 0.01p to 11.43p per hour. I imagine foreigns don’t have to deal with holiday entitlements too, but it’s more like UK farmland owners getting stiffed by too much regs, rather than foreign cheating or ignoring them.
Imv, of course.
Reminder. The EU did not start until 1992, prior to that it was the EEC which Britain joined in 1973 along with Ireland and Denmark, when it contained just six others.
Up until 1992 import/export formalities were standard and during the 1970s and into the 1980s tariff and non-tariffs applied between UK andMember States, and non-EEC European and other Countries.
Having been involved in business importing/exporting from 1977 to 2000, I really don’t understand the problem.
We imported from USA, Canada and Australia outside Europe. It was a simple matter to work with exporters to ensure product shipped complied with EU regs.
And remember folks – if Germany ships anything to France it must be labelled in French and comply with French standards. The notion that there are only EU standards is in the heads of people with no experience of trade.
(Farming) should be classed as a public good.
You can’t “class” something as a public good, it’s a description of physical characteristics. It’s like saying that water should be “classed” as wet.
Does one person famrming stop another person farming? I don’t think so. Farming one particular field stops somebody else farming that particular field, but “farming” itself does not.
Can somebody benefit from “farming” without contracting to it? Can “farming” be freeloaded? I don’t think so. To benefit from “farming” you have to pay for the results of it.
So, “farming” is not a public good.
It’s why many UK products are now marked “Not for EU”.
Bollocks. Complete bollocks. It’s labelled Not for EU to show a product isn’t going to be exported to the EU and therefore doesn’t attract tariffs when imported to Northern Ireland (goes via the green channel in Rishi’s fucked up Windsor Framework). And to further show that fat cunt Rayners ignorance, basically the stuff that attracts tariffs is anything imported into the UK from the EU then re-exported to the EU. Most of the stuff made in GB doesn’t attract a tariff.
Britain is surrounded by salty seas, so all you need to produce salt is fire, which technology has existed for quite a while. I don’t understand why we’d ever have needed to import salt, from Clogland or anywhere else.