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Brexit: give me a positive effect... XIII

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Just cold, hard facts. The Pharmacology suppliers have had to sign NDA's with this gov. over Brexit which is why up to now only the manufacturers have been telling us how everything is normal, which it is, but a lot of generic medicine companies are shutting down as they will have no market in the EU or NI after the grace period ends in Dec.
First they came for the fishermen then the farmers and then the hospitality sector, I'm sure they will get around to the whine merchants soon enough

I wasn't disputing the facts, I was merely observing that you sounded positively jubilant, which you did. Every knock back that the UK receives seems to further animate the diehard EUphiles into paroxism of near ecstacy.

Alternatively, when the news is not so bad, they rush to point out the negatives.

I see that one honourable member, having spent 5 years pointing the finger and shouting about how brexit had brought about the disastrous collapse of sterling is now bemoaning the fact that it has slightly recovered.
 
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I tried to buy something from Italy. After agreeing the additional £200 of customs charges beyond what it would have cost previously, the seller withdrew as he could not be bothered with the three-page document he had to complete. I cannot see anything other than a devastating effect on trade.
 
Won't it be interesting, though, to learn whether the ECJ is supreme after all? I rather hope the Germans win and prove that the vassalage to the EU was another myth, like straight bananas.

I read up on this quite a bit some years back. To cut a very long story short (yes, I know), the UK as a member of the EU was actually less sovereign than Germany is as a member of the EU.
 
I read up on this quite a bit some years back. To cut a very long story short (yes, I know), the UK as a member of the EU was actually less sovereign than Germany is as a member of the EU.

Thank you for cutting the explanation short because the conclusion posited is contentious, and the situation is far more complex. For example, the UK entrenched the European Union Act 2011 to ensure no further amendments could be made to the TFEU or the TEU without having previously passed a referendum by the British people. The Act was specifically intended to ensure that the UK Parliament and people could have their say on any proposed transfer of powers to the EU, at least according to William Hague at the time. I don't believe you can accurately say that any one member state is any more or less sovereign (whatever that means) than another because there are so many legal complexities, variables, historical factors and opt-outs involved.
 
Which is what I meant when I wrote 'very long story'.

I think in summation the German Federal Constitutional Court theoretically protects German sovereignty to a greater extent than the UK's was protected as a member because it doesn't recognise the EU as a de facto sovereign entity. This is associated to the root of this current issue by the fact that the Federal Constitutional Court has long argued (since 1964) that primacy of the ECJ is not set out in the Treaties, but has been advanced by judicial activism.
 
I tried to buy something from Italy. After agreeing the additional £200 of customs charges beyond what it would have cost previously, the seller withdrew as he could not be bothered with the three-page document he had to complete. I cannot see anything other than a devastating effect on trade.
Italy is broke. They joined the EEC to improve foreign trade, now the EU dictates the maximum size of hair dryer and restricts trade to their customers outside of the EU. China will be only too happy to pick up the business.
 
Looking at items on eBay the same thing is twice the price from Italy. Who would buy from there?
Loss of trade is the price they pay for being in the EU I suppose.
 
Italy is broke. They joined the EEC to improve foreign trade, now the EU dictates the maximum size of hair dryer and restricts trade to their customers outside of the EU. China will be only too happy to pick up the business.
Italy's foreign trade outside the EU is doing quite well, actually. When British manufacturers venture outside their comfort zone to places like Asia, you can bet they come to markets where Italian exporters are already active, at least in certain industries like mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, components etc.

"In April 2021 the trade balance with non-EU27 countries registered a surplus of 4,846 million euro; excluding energy, the surplus was equal to 7,747 million euro, up compared with a 1,167 million euro surplus in April 2020." Istituto Nazionale di Statistica.

Looking at their stats, they have recorded substantial trade surpluses every single month of every single year, in the region of 1 to 5 billion euro, with the exception of April 2020 (Covid impact), when there was a small defict of 100 million. I wonder how that compares with Britain's non-EU trade surplus (I haven't looked).
 
It does intrigue me that the EU seems to make it so difficult for small firms to export. The EX-1 document that I suspect the OP is referring to above is so complicated that it requires a broker to fill it in, at a cost of £65 a shot.

The April trade figures released last week show a collapse in imports from the bloc, whilst imports from outside the EU were the highest on record. UK exports into the bloc have somewhat recovered, running at about 9% below the equivalent 2019 figure, and higher than last September.

Why has there been such a fall off in imports from the EU, especially given that the UK has been conducting a soft touch regime at Dover? Import substitution, people feeling hacked off by the EU's aggressive antics, or the fact that the bloc seems to actually make it difficult to export? Presumably a combination of all three.
 
It does intrigue me that the EU seems to make it so difficult for small firms to export. The EX-1 document that I suspect the OP is referring to above is so complicated that it requires a broker to fill it in, at a cost of £65 a shot.

The April trade figures released last week show a collapse in imports from the bloc, whilst imports from outside the EU were the highest on record. UK exports into the bloc have somewhat recovered, running at about 9% below the equivalent 2019 figure, and higher than last September.

Why has there been such a fall off in imports from the EU, especially given that the UK has been conducting a soft touch regime at Dover? Import substitution, people feeling hacked off by the EU's aggressive antics, or the fact that the bloc seems to actually make it difficult to export? Presumably a combination of all three.
Without thinking about it too much, one could add a fourth possibility: EU exporters deciding that shipping to the UK right now is not worth the bother, at least until the dust has settled down. Maybe a fifth: different product mix between exports and imports (maybe more perishables on the UK's import side, from smaller companies). Etc.
 
As PsB said, the UK may have been conducting a soft-touch approach at Dover but that does not cover the countless individual items that never even get that far because either the buyer or the seller look at the form filling, costs and delays involved and decide just not to bother.
 
[Brian] Was that aimed at me, Hugh because you and your Remoaner chums (continues for several pages) [/Brian].
LOL. I've never used the word "Remoaner"...

[hard remainer]That's bilge. We think you voted to leave the EU so you are a thick racist moron and must be cancelled. I demand you give me a benefit of brexit even though we will never accept anything as one. You voted for it, it is shit and we told you so, everything that has gone wrong since 2016 is due to brexit and we are right, you are wrong. na na ni na na :p [/hard remainer]
 
Without thinking about it too much, one could add a fourth possibility: EU exporters deciding that shipping to the UK right now is not worth the bother, at least until the dust has settled down. Maybe a fifth: different product mix between exports and imports (maybe more perishables on the UK's import side, from smaller companies). Etc.

Yes, I think certainly these too. I just wonder why the EU doesn't go out of its way to help its exporters, rather than hinder them with excessively complex bureaucracy.

I had some documentation from HMRC yesterday referring to a system called One Stop Shop that will streamline VAT matters, presumably on multiple inputs. I haven't studied it yet.
 
Yes, I think certainly these too. I just wonder why the EU doesn't go out of its way to help its exporters, rather than hinder them with excessively complex bureaucracy.

I had some documentation from HMRC yesterday referring to a system called One Stop Shop that will streamline VAT matters, presumably on multiple inputs. I haven't studied it yet.
The EU has this wonderful system to help its exporters called the Single Market. The British were instrumental in setting it up...
I do hope that everything will settle down soon, at least some time this year. I have a set of speakers to send back for refurb...
 
The EU has this wonderful system to help its exporters called the Single Market. The British were instrumental in setting it up...
I do hope that everything will settle down soon, at least some time this year. I have a set of speakers to send back for refurb...

Sounds like a good idea. It will never catch on though when you can have better deals all around the world with China, Australia and the US and the moon and Jupiter.
 
The EU has this wonderful system to help its exporters called the Single Market. The British were instrumental in setting it up...
I do hope that everything will settle down soon, at least some time this year. I have a set of speakers to send back for refurb...
The low cost EEC has gone.
 
Without thinking about it too much, one could add a fourth possibility: EU exporters deciding that shipping to the UK right now is not worth the bother, at least until the dust has settled down. Maybe a fifth: different product mix between exports and imports (maybe more perishables on the UK's import side, from smaller companies). Etc.
The Chinese and other non EU countries will be more than happy to supply the UK.
 
It’s astonishing how people still cling to moaning about ‘punishment beatings,’ and how the U.K. is being treated so unfairly.
It isn’t.
The U.K. is being treated exactly as any other third country, which is what the U.K. told the EU it wanted to be.

I've sort of belatedly registered this. It picked up an impressive tally of 'likes' from pfm's excitably mutual back slapping EU in-crowd, the more so because it's patent nonsense. The UK is definitively not treated exactly as any other third country. There is no other third country a proportion of whose citizens have absolutely no representation within the institutions that write reams of their laws, decide what they can and can't buy and eat for breakfast, prevent movement of presents, farm animals, pets and even mud from other parts of their own country, and are effectively annexed in trade terms. Now even if we grant that this situation arose with the signed consent of their own government, there is no other sovereign entity with which the EU makes its trade agreement incumbent upon having free rein to take the fish from their own waters or to dictate state aid rules. It grants countries such as Canada, the US and Japan greater access to its financial services markets than it does the UK, and even grants New Zealand, with which it has no trade deal, SPS equivalence, whilst refusing it to the UK, with which it is not merely aligned, but which has higher animal welfare standards than the EU itself.

And the list goes on. I'd expect that the tally of WTO/MFN rules (international laws, no less) that are being broken or ignored by the EU in respect of the UK would even shame the pfm mutual 'likes' crowd.
 
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