Brexit discussion thread XIV (Please read OP before posting)

And she just pissed off the people of Liverpool by linking a Sun article. Tone deaf Tories.

The funniest thing about this is that she linked a tabloid, gutter paper's story on the appointment, and not an official government announcement on an official government site

Didn't they recently announce a deal with Australia that bent UK farmers over a table? Did that one eventually fall apart?

This exactly.

Isn't subterfuge. Nothing more. Distract away from Afghanistan, get people miffed off about it. Even the method of the announcement shows that.

You can't really believe this is a shrewd move. It's shrewd in a sense that is more in a litany of wind up attempts .

It just seems a cheap gimmick - they may as well have appointed some TV personality off the BBC or ITV, like Jeremy Clarkson or Anne Robinson. The Brexiteer crowd are not very serious people.

Just to note. If Catherine Hoey is Kate Hoey, she is 75.

I guess an interesting aspect is how the extreme end of hardcore Tory Euroscepticism became much bigger over the years. John Major faced up to about 20 or so Maastricht Rebels in the early 1990s. Their numbers had grown to at least 60 in recent years (around a fifth of the party's MPs when May was in charge......that's a lot).

But doesn't that mean that they are effectively adhering to EU standards, for that is what would be a key driver for the CE mark? Or is it different?

There is no doubt that Brexit is playing a part, but it must be more than that. There are no customs checks on inbound goods at present into the Uk, given that they have yet to actually control their borders, so it isn't supply of the produce.

Is is really simply due to lack of workers (hauliers etc) and how much is that down to the 'pingdemic'? Given that Brexit hasn't fully happened, surely we cannot be seeing such big effects of it at this stage?

No idea. Some polls yesterday had the Tories up 3 points to 42 percent.

It's off the wall. Evidently people are simply not reading anything or just simply don't care.

The Tories pretty much have free reign to do absolutely anything they like.

Yes, that's the uncomfortable irony. Products for sale or use in the GB market (not UK as NI will still operate under the CE mark as part of the TCA/WA) will have to adhere the the EU CE mark and any amendments to same made by the EU which Westminster will have absolutely zero influence over. They'll just have to grin (or more likely shout their frustration at the EU imposing more pointless bureaucracy on Brexit Britain via headlines in the Daily Express and fight them on the beaches type orations by Mark Francois and the like.

Delicious.

It’s a combination of factors, but ultimately they all link back to Brexit, with Covid supercharging (fast-tracking, really) the issue since last year.

The main factors are-

1.UK drivers too few/too old

2.EU27 drivers moving back to better-paying / -perk’d jobs in the EU27 post-Brexit (never more so than since Covid started Mar-Apr 2020, but earlier changes to UK tax also played a big role)

3.EU27 drivers without a UK-EU27 return load, not able to make an EU27-UK trip profitable through cabotage whilst in the UK (since 01/01/21)

4.HGV pay/skill levels well short of post-Brexit UK PBS/work visa thresholds (and the UK gvt’s complete ideological opposition to doing anything about it)

I read somewhere that 35,000 Romanian HGV drivers went back to the Continent since Brexit (not sure if that means 2016 or 2019 or…).

Most observers without an ‘in’, are also very far from seeing the full picture: for every headlining story about empty supermarket shelf, Nando, McD, etc., there’s umpteen SMEs in the British economy background with *worse* logistics (and therefore productivity, sales and profitability-) problems, because they haven’t got the Sainsbury’s, Nando or McD chequebook and logistics industry/volume pull factor.

Full-fat Brexit hasn’t happened yet, as you rightly note. This problem will get far worse then.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/24/brexit-failure-remainers-shelves-empty-eu

Rafael Behr best writer bar none on the Brits and brexit,

This is a major admission that the British empire is well and truly over and that the UK will forever be rule takers from bigger international blocks like the EU. It would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic that they even thought that they could force every supplier to pay extra to certify against the new UK standards rather than simply deciding not to bother exporting their goods to the UK anymore

This wasn't so bad when the UK were at the top table helping to draft those rules. But Brexit means Brexit after all...

Was anybody bar the brexit fanatics ever in any doubt this would be the situation?

It's obvious from much of the commentary on social media that the majority of Leave voters hadn't a clue what they were voting. Fell for a load of cheap populist slogans, without understanding the consequences of them or what Brexit would actually entail.

Cameron was some optimist - failing to understand the English public's capacity to mess up. He was probably thinking to himself 'they couldn't possibly be so stupid as to actually vote for all this nonsense'.

Fcuk them… They were told like the rest of the EU population what Brexit would mean. Access to the same info.

They chose their path based on their opinion that they know better.

I know for a fact that the British government did consult businesses, as I took part in it at the time and posted about it in an earlier instance of the ‘Brexit’ thread in here. It was a long time back, 2017 IIRC.

I also know for a fact that ours wasn’t the only business consulted in our game and, as a pretty niche legal services provider, logic strongly suggests that we can’t have been the only line of business consulted - rather the tail end of it, if anything.

But the evidence, pretty much incontrovertible at this stage, is that so far, successive British government have chosen not to let such consultations impinge their policies.

The more cynical in me continues to believe that this was, and continues to be, by design rather than ignorance. UK plc is on its arse and going ever more for a song every passing day, and overseas (esp.US) asset and venture groups are hoovering them up at a rate of knots (for headline acts, see Morrison’s, Sainsbury’s is likely next).

It does seem like they could have been persuaded to do just about anything in a referendum by Farage, Vote Leave and the right wing press. Scrap the House of Commons, ditch the monarchy, ditch the legal system (and all the time assuming there would be no real world consequences to their vote, none that would affect them anyway).

I think a major problem has been as a united group with a very narrow focus, ambitious people in the Tories saw bowing and scraping to the ERG as a necessary way to climb the greasy pole.

Another factor is that under the FPTP system, the Tories had no choice but to accommodate these extremists. The ERG should really have been in a right wing / far right English nationalist party of their own, not in a mainstream party of government. To make things worse, the entire parliamentary party has been taken over by these guys, with moderates and centrists forced aside.