“At last the leopards have started to eat my face!”
12 Likes
I think what the last two vaguely sane brain cells in Leadsom’s head might have been trying to say was “at last, the leopards have started to eat all our faces, Brexit voters”
5 Likes
Yeah - we can plant them in our own shit (mostly courtesy of the privatised water companies) /s (with despair)
7 Likes
I’m sure the Tories had the foresight to stock up on “adequate” supplies of imported food … for themselves, of course.
An opportunity to remind commenters about the new BBS policy.
12 Likes
I’m sure that just increasing the chocolate ration to 20 grams, from 30, should keep the load on border control entirely manageable.
8 Likes
I don’t mean to imply the slightest confidence in the execution or effectiveness of UK border control activities(either in successfully upholding the standards or even necessarily having well-formed standards to be upholding); but I wouldn’t agree that Brexit would necessarily be a non-event:
You’ve gone from a situation where a producer or distributor would face the same standards regardless of which side of the border they seek to sell on to one where EU food safety standards apply on one side and do not on the other; which looks an awful lot like an opportunity for some, er, ‘regulatory arbitrage’ if a plucky entrepreneur finds themselves in possession of locally unsaleable goods.
Obviously the border control mechanisms won’t help if the standards being enforced simply allow things that you really should be worried about; or if they aren’t implemented effectively; but it’s by no means implausible to suspect that going from uniform standards on both sides to a EU standards on one side and a chaotic new Brussels-isn’t-the-boss-of-me standard on the other could attract an excitingly widened range of product quality.
11 Likes
The Salt and Vinegar Chips Curtain
or
Driving on the wrong side of the road Curtain.
or
The Terry Gilliam Cartoon Curtain. (yes, I know he’s American)
3 Likes
I am just so sick of Brexit, when will the tory party implode so there are no more lies pumped into the media landscape and we can undo it slowly, re join the single market etc… Eu membership by stealth…
1 Like
Brexit was a terrible idea for all sorts of reasons, but any suggestion that as a consequence we here in the UK must now worry about our food being unsafe is just silly. The “common standards” were never about keeping consumers safe from dangerous food, but were, instead, a tool to keep farmers and other producers safe from competition. Talk about some future government going rogue and imperiling its citizens by allowing food safety standards to fall sounds scary, but that kind of worry must apply to all governments, including the EU. I don’t see any reason to take that worry seriously about the EU, nor about the UK.
Ah, this must be the ‘sunlit uplands’ Boris boasted about 
They drive on the left in Eire too.
4 Likes
To justify inspections on the border, the standards don’t have to be inferior. They only have to be different.
5 Likes
As always they are a bit of both as well as actually being about what they are supposed to be about namely ensuring a level playing field for producers from different countries within the EU.
How seriously one has to take it is of course a question for everyone to determine for themselves.
In that respect, I would suggest that if you have a legislative body controlled by people with a proven track record of not only saying they want to reduce regulations in favour of profit but actually weakening regulations in favour of profit/political posturing, then one might want to take that risk a bit more seriously than otherwise.
Like it or not, many countries produce foodstuffs and other products using a variety of methods and materials that most people in Europe (including the UK) would consider unsafe and/or unsanitary or ethically unacceptable.
The pro-Brexit argument was clearly articulated that post Brexit the UK would be able to alter its rules to allow imports of many of those products.
It was in fact the only halfway realistic argument for Brexit.
If you think the party currently in power wouldn’t cheerfully shaft some food safety regulations in order to be able to say they’ve got a Brexit dividend, I would just point out that this is the same party that attempted to feed potentially BSE infected beef to the daughter of a cabinet minister just to make a political point.
And this was while the party was considered relatively sane.
9 Likes
Brexit was obviously a bad idea with lots of costs and basically no benefits, but if I’m reading correctly, this particular one works out to about $7/person/year? I’m sure some business owners will be harder hit than that, but is it concentrated enough anywhere to really hurt more than a miniscule number of people?
Maybe rather than dismissing a problem if it only hurts a small number of people, we can look at the people being hurt and center them, and work for a solution that way? Because if we focus only on the people who are already winners, then we’ll never fix any problems. Because we’re constantly centering the people who aren’t being hurt by bad policy… It’s like saying we don’t need to do anything about homelessness, because most people have housing, so we can safely ignore the “minuscule” amount of people who don’t…
7 Likes
I would reluctantly agree to this one if it means that those of us here in “salt and sauce” territory get to escape.
1 Like
I’m not dismissing them (or didn’t intend to, anyway). I’m trying to figure out (of the people disproportionately affected by this change) whether they exist, where they are, and who they are.
I think in principle you’d agree that “Some people are hurt by this policy” is not a knock-down argument against that policy. Otherwise that would rule out almost everything any government could possibly do, including many (good) policies you’ve made clear you support. So it’s kind of important to know those answers, before deciding whether I should care about that in any particular case.
I expect the total cost of Brexit to be high, and detrimental. I care about that, and the people it affects. I also care about actually understanding what’s going on, and in general what this article is telling me is, “On average, a typical person’s annual grocery bill will go up by about the price of a pound of cheddar.” That’s just plain not enough to warrant a claim that I should be outraged by it, without more context. If the article said that experts predict the effects will be disproportionately affecting the foods that poorer people are buying, that would be very different. If it said that there were X number of other similarly-individually-small changes coming that add up to $7*X, I’d care about that too. Otherwise I’d really much rather focus on the relatively-large components of the costs of Brexit, or on how to go about fixing or not making these kinds of bad policy decisions in the future.
1 Like
No, but your comment that it’s only hurting a minuscule number of people seems a bit dismissive to me. If that’s not your intent, maybe clarify a bit? After all, the people who will be hurt by this are the working poor, many of whom have already been struggling in the UK under the tory government. That’s the people most are concerned with, not necessarily business owners.
5 Likes
This isn’t a bad policy decision, it’s yet another negative outcome of a monumentally bad political decision. That’s why it’s important to highlight every single one of them, no matter how small it seems.
For the UK as a whole, there is no fixing this situation except to vote the Tories out of office and then grovelling to the EU for re-admission.
9 Likes
And as I said, we should pay mind to the most vulnerable who are going to be hurt by the raising of prices on a basic necessity. Viewing policy from the bottom up (meaning who does this policy negatively impact) is the most productive way to help the most amount of people…
8 Likes
