To be honest, I’m not sure police in most of the EU care much about the stickers either way. Except as a handy thing to throw at a driver when they’ve already decided to do you for something.
It’s not as if police can’t tell which country a vehicle is registered in without a magic sticker.
I doubt anyone is going to be stopped for not having the sticker provided they otherwise don’t draw attention to themselves.
But once the police have pulled you over for speeding or whatever then sure, not having the relevant sticker is something else to add to the list.
Having said that I don’t even know what the penalty is for not having a sticker or where the legal obligation to have one is laid down.
And as with most things on gov.uk, the UK government certainly isn’t going to tell me. It just says “you must”. Some of us would appreciate a link to the relevant legislation or even just a mention of it.
Even if it is some nasty foreign treaty or charter /s
ETA:
It’s the Geneva Convention on Road Traffic
and also the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic
Main outcome of not having the sticker seems to be that the car simply cannot legally be driven abroad which is obviously a bit of an issue.
In practice I suspect most times you’d be told to sort yourself out with a sticker sharpish but the risk of simply having your vehicle seized is probably not worth the £1 or so for a new sticker.
Or in my case a few minutes with some magic markers to turn a GB into a UK. Having only recently bought a GB sticker and being too bloody-minded to buy a new one.
ETA
For people without local knowledge. Smuggling was always going to be a guaranteed growth industry post Brexit. Diesel is a better game than drugs in many ways (rural farmers are much less likely to be harassed by the law than kids taking and selling drugs on the streets for one)… And that’s it basically. Make a border with different rules on each side, make a smuggler. They call it arbitrage when it’s posh people doing it.
This is still going to get worse before it gets better. If it ever does and probably not to where it was before the great British public decided to cut off their noses to spite their faces.
Thousands of Germans who live in the UK have been written to by the government asking them to drive lorries in an attempt to ease the UK fuel crisis, even though the majority have never been at the wheel of an HGV.
They were included in a 1m-letter mass mailing that also tried to recruit ambulance drivers to get behind the wheel of lorries.
…
The Germans were automatically included in the mailout because German driving licences issued before 1999 include an entitlement to drive small- to medium-sized trucks of up to 7.5 tonnes.
But there has been an interesting change. Up to now, there was an image spread of the former colonies including Ireland. It suggested that we were somehow hot-headed and given to soft patriotism and nationalist sentimentality, that we could not be trusted in negotiation, that we spoke with a forked tongue. Now, all of these qualities have been taken over by Whitehall itself. But it is worse on this occasion. We, at least, were actually colonised. The United Kingdom, such as it is, was only ever colonised in its dreams, and by the EU, of all things. Dealing with the UK now, as Lloyd George said about Eamon de Valera, is like trying to pick up mercury with a fork.
Here’s hoping… I live in England, but our fucked up politics are screwing over generations of Scots, Irish and Welsh children, let them decide their fates.
Cheeky chappy rides horse around London filling station, singing: 'I don’t need petrol ‘cos he runs on carrots’
[…]
It’s a suboptimal situation but an effective ad campaign for electric cars or, indeed, any other mode of transport that doesn’t run on fossil fuels.
[…]
Fine anyways, cuz Intel is in deep poo, it’s why Apple abandonded them, and they’re every day further behind TSMC and AMD in die sizes, couldn’t make a functional 5G modem (for phones), and so on.
Yes, yes. I suppose you will build your own coal-powered factories for producing silicon-based integrated circuits at an industrial scale.
With Pontoon. And ladies of negotiable affections.
Reading Enid Blyton as an adult reveals a world of poverty and exhausted adults. As a kid I took it in stride that their dad finally got a job and the whole family had to move from the city to a country town by train then walk a few miles late at night to their new home, each kid carrying whatever mattered to them plus a few kitchen bits. As a grown-up reading it I think “That’s… not a great situation.”
