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Brexit: ‘the biggest disaster any government has ever negotiated’
- ekianjo 5y agoErm, so because you suffer from the changes, suddenly you generalize to "the biggest disaster ever"?
- Gravityloss 5y agoI'm not familiar with the matter at all, but wouldn't there be a flip side, that his company has now a lot less competition from EU cheese makers in the UK?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- skywhopper 5y agoDepends on whether the UK was a net exporter of such products.
- Gravityloss 5y agoI vaguely remember a story where, shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed, someone managed to take over a factory making erasers and made a fortune. Maybe it was the only functioning one and imports didn't work for some reason...
- halpert 5y ago“Russian oligarchs” you hear about so often in the news are essentially gangsters that pilfered the valuable assets from the collapsed USSR. Many different types of factories were taken and profited from.
- hunglee2 5y agohe deals with this question at the end of the interview, when he says marketing costs have gone through the roof as all other UK (ex)exporters now are forced to focus on (much smaller) domestic UK market
- zarzavat 5y agoThe UK is too densely populated to be agriculturally self-sufficient, thus all major parties believe in free market principles when applied to food imports, because attempts at protectionism would lead to huge inflation and would doom any party that tried it. The only debate is whether food should be imported from the US or from the EU.
- Grakel 5y agoBiggest disaster ever because a cheese maker can't export to countries that already have thriving cheese industries.
- aurizon 5y agoYes, no longer a 'domestic cheesemaker', now they are a more less barred by the protectionism
- Veen 5y agoIn fact, the rules around importing whole milk products direct to the consumer have nothing to do with Brexit negotiations. It's a rule that was introduced by the EU in December 2019 and it applies to all third-party countries. It's unlikely in the extreme that the UK would ever have been given an exemption post-Brexit.
- aurizon 5y agoThe Brexit addled PM essentially killed the UK toehold in the EU. They are now a pimple on an elephant. More and more EU buyers and sellers with both with the added paperwork for Customs and VAT and do not forget label and electrical standards are just not going to both and will not buy/sell to the UK. Here in Canada we see many ebay sellers with "not shipped to Canada" for simple added postage/UPS/DHL procedures - which cost extra. UPS and USPS will ship to Canada - but it needs more labelling, a pro-forma customs invoice, and a different process to ship. The UK is already ruing the day that they let Johnson and the Brexit RA-RA stampede them into leaving. Labor and manufacturing are already being hammered - which Brexit blames on Covid....after Covid...it will not be coming back. Time for a new PM/Party/whatever!!!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- thomascgalvin 5y ago> The Brexit addled PM essentially killed the UK toehold in the EU. I'm sitting on the sidelines in the US, where we have our own problems, but this seems like the kind of unforced error that results in generations-long harm. The UK gambled that their ball was so important that threatening to take it and go home would force concessions from everyone else in the EU. The EU, instead, has made it clear that the UK needs to EU, not the other way around. This leaves the UK with no bargaining chips. The very best they can hope for is being able to come back to the table, hat in hand, asking to be readmitted. And even if the EU allows them to return, there will be no special considerations given to the UK this time around. There are literally no upsides for the UK here.
- inglor_cz 5y ago"The very best they can hope for is being able to come back to the table, hat in hand, asking to be readmitted." As far as I know both the UK and the EU, this is not going to happen. Not just out of pride; the UK and the Franco-German axis of the EU were never a good political match and after this divorce, they will drift even more apart, because they do not need to hammer out compromises anymore. IMHO the UK was smart to avoid entering the Eurozone. The monetary union without fiscal union is a wobbly construction, papered over by extremely low interest rates and sovereign debt buying programs such as PEPP. One of the important features of earlier EEC was convergence of the periphery with the center; it still works to some degree in Central and Eastern Europe, but it stopped working in the Mediterranean.
- rayiner 5y ago
- 999900000999 5y agoI visited London right after Brexit. Young people got heavily screwed out of visa free work in Europe. Fear mongering and xenophobia unfortunately won in Britain. I wonder if in 10 years or so it would be possible to re enter the EU
- Veen 5y agoWhat's stopping them getting a visa if they need one? I don't understand this xenophobia point: post-Brexit, the evil xenophobic Tories changed the visa rules so that 3 million Hong Kong citizens were entitled to live here. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-53246899 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-53246899 In 2020, 715,000 people immigrated to the UK and in 2021 there were 4 million foreign nationals working here. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06077/ https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06... https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/articles/measuringmigrationthestorybehindtheheadlines/2021-09-17 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati... It doesn't sound terribly xenophobic to me.
- thorawy88 5y ago
- w0de0 5y agoGood point. Not sure why they invented the EU in the first place. Bunch of unnecessary bother, really.
- Veen 5y agoOver half of UK citizens agree with you, although I'm not sure how simply repeating the majority opinion helps with this conversation.
- LatteLazy 5y agoFor a lot of EU countries they had no visa processes for UK citizens because no one had needed one for decades. Then there is the difficulty of getting a visa. The expense, the time, the effort, the weird rules. I looked at getting a German visa as I worked there on and off. But I can't because my German is meh. That was no problem for my employers, coworkers or people I knew there. But it is now. That's what I stopping us...
- oxfeed65261 5y agoThis article is interesting, but it is the perspective of a single cheesemaker who was seriously harmed by Brexit. I would be really interested in a broader analysis of the overall effects of Brexit on the United Kingdom. I looked for this a week or two ago with disappointing results. Can anyone suggest such an article?
- Veen 5y agoI think the discourse is still too politicized to get a clear view either way. Most outlets synthesizing data from multiple sources have a political axe to grind about Brexit, whether pro or anti, so your best bet is just to look at economic indicators and see how they're doing. Plus, it's difficult to separate Brexit effects from COVID effects. Unemployment is very low compared to the last few decades. Government borrowing is obviously very high because of COVID measures. Houses prices are very high, which is good or bad depending on your perspective. GDP is growing and the UK is not in recession, but inflation is rising and that may cause significant problems next year. It'll probably be a few years before we can definitively say whether the UK is going to turn into a basket case or not.
- lazyeye 5y agoAlso the benefit may not be directly measurable but still incredibly important. For example what will be the cumulative impact over the next 100 years of having the people in the UK making the decisions, directly accountable to voters again.
- Arnt 5y agoCould you explain how Boris is being held directly accountable? And perhaps some decisions that might lead to some incredibly important benefit?
- native_samples 5y agoElections, deregulation.
- CodeGlitch 5y agoSigh. Not this discussion again. Also it's the guardian, may as well post a telegraph article that says the exact opposite. My take on it: when money is involved, humans are excellent at optimising those systems. Look at the lengths and success of people/companies go through to minimise paying tax. What I'm trying to say is that we'll be fine once the existing systems are optimised for us not being in the EU. Obviously we're in the adjustment period, and I feel sorry for the people struggling with that.
- zarzavat 5y agoThere's nothing optimal or rational about international trade. It's full of the most vocal minorities screwing things up for everyone else (and sometimes themselves, see fishermen voting for Brexit). That's why trade agreements are usually negotiated in secret, to protect the parties from themselves. In 20 years when the coalition of bigots and reactionaries and profiteers that gave us this mess have expired, we might be able to return to something resembling a rational arrangement. Or not, perhaps we will slip further and further into oblivion such as Russia did after the USSR.
- pydry 5y ago>That's why trade agreements are usually negotiated in secret The last deal I saw negotiated in secret and then leaked (TPP) ended up being a corporate wishlist that benefitted nobody except large companies. The most absurd part was that it was more about extending copyright and setting up extra-judicial courts than dropping tarriffs yet they still called it a "free trade deal". Fortunate that it was leaked otherwise this abortion of a deal would have passed.
- CodeGlitch 5y ago> In 20 years when the coalition of bigots I was willing to listen to your argument up to this point. Throwing the "everyone who I disagree with is a bigot" around is very old hat at this point.
- d1sxeyes 5y ago
- matthewmacleod 5y agoHonestly it’s just a massive pain in the arse for any company that does business in the single market. Exporting and importing is now more expensive and wrapped in miles of red tape. It hurts small businesses in particular, who can’t exploit economies of scale in dealing with the bureaucracy. Even trying to be somewhat objective about it, it is genuinely difficult to see where any concrete benefits are going to come from.
- coolso 5y agoI'm a little surprised such a histrionic headline is sticking for this one here. After living through the same dramatic statements every day from 2016-2020 here in the US about how the last administration was the biggest disaster ever, well, thanks to that "disaster" we had gas that was $1.50/gal cheaper, inflation was minimal, taxes were lower, we had far fewer illegal border crossings, a competent leader for getting us out of Afghanistan the right way, and so on. But, if you read the headlines daily, the world was coming to an end. Today we have a more polite president, but far more expensive gas, crazy inflation, the Afghanistan situation was a mess, we have the most illegal border crossings in decades and decades, and double the deaths in the same period as the last administration. But if you read the headlines, things are heading in the right direction, well, because, totally unbiased of course. Bad things happen, but they're really not a big deal, and actually, Biden doesn't really have much to do with it. Here's Why. The media drives me nuts.
- jokoon 5y agoIt's a pretty nice experiment to see what happens when you don't encourage trade. The biggest benefit from trade between countries is that it prevents war.
- Olumde 5y agoI used to live in the seaside town of Bournemouth and every summer thousands of teenage kids from all over Europe would come to study at the many language schools which are now suffering and tanking local economies thanks To Brexit. https://www.ft.com/content/64346956-4ae4-4751-8b81-db7f1d57839f https://www.ft.com/content/64346956-4ae4-4751-8b81-db7f1d578... The Au Pair system too is languishing. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/nov/18/families-are-desperate-an-au-pair-agent-on-life-without-eu-workers https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/nov/18/familie...