Brexit Consequences

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Woodchopper
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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by Woodchopper » Wed Jun 09, 2021 1:58 pm

kerrya1 wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 1:34 pm
Woodchopper wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 12:28 pm
shpalman wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 11:50 am
sausages

If the Northern Ireland market is big enough, and with almost 2 million it should be, aren’t we just going to see the favourite brands set up production there? That would involve higher costs but I don’t really see how people are going to be permanently denied their favourite foods.
But is that really big enough? Northern Ireland is only ~3% of the UK population so would it really be worthwhile a company that has a big factory in mainland UK setting up a whole new plant, with new supply lines, etc just for that 3%? If the factory was going to serve the whole island of Ireland then that would give a population of ~7million, but there would need to be no border on the island to maximise efficiency.
I assume it comes down to price. People can buy hipster sausages that are hand made my hearty men with tattoos and beards. But they cost a lot more than mass produced sausages bought in a supermarket. Production for a 2 million person market may well be more expensive than for the UK as a whole. But on the other hand, the cost to the consumer also includes things like retail, transport and marketing.

We can wait and see if the protocol has encouraged the creation of a NI sausage production industry.

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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by Woodchopper » Wed Jun 09, 2021 2:00 pm

shpalman wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 1:54 pm
From the live blog:
Do you think the UK agreed the protocol in bad faith?

Šefčovič says he would not put it like that. He says when the agreement was negotiated, the British may be did not fully estimate what the consequences could be of the Brexit they had chosen.

Now “more and more things are coming to the table”, he says.

Every time he meets Lord Frost, new problems crop up. Some of them were foreseen, and some were not.

He says that was the problem.

He says the EU wants a roadmap, showing, for example, when the IT system (to administer checks at the GB/NI border) will be in place.
Both the EU and UK really wanted a deal and both were prepared to ignore all sorts of things they knew at the time were likely to be problems.

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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by WFJ » Wed Jun 09, 2021 2:06 pm

Woodchopper wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 2:00 pm
Both the EU and UK really wanted a deal and both were prepared to ignore all sorts of things they knew at the time were likely to be problems.
But the EU had the good sense to make sure that the deal included the points they considered important, while Johnson and his team just signed it either without reading it or without thinking through the implications of what they were signing.

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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by jimbob » Wed Jun 09, 2021 3:13 pm

shpalman wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 11:50 am
sausages
that idiot David Frost wrote:“Further threats of legal action and trade retaliation from the EU won’t make life any easier for the shopper in Strabane who can’t buy their favourite product. Nor will it benefit the small business in Ballymena struggling to source produce from their supplier in Birmingham.”
What would make life easier for them, you failure at your one job, would be for the rest of the UK to accept alignment with EU standards.
The protocol has been hugely controversial in Northern Ireland, contributing to violence over Easter and fissures in the Democratic Unionist party, which is officially campaigning to have it scrapped, having helped enable this whole f.cking shitshow in the first place.
To continue to accept alignment with EU standards, as at the moment, they haven't diverged in most cases, and we all know that Brexit means no lowering of UK standards, as we have been told multiple times. :roll:
Have you considered stupidity as an explanation

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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by shpalman » Wed Jun 09, 2021 3:17 pm

jimbob wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 3:13 pm
shpalman wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 11:50 am
sausages
that idiot David Frost wrote:“Further threats of legal action and trade retaliation from the EU won’t make life any easier for the shopper in Strabane who can’t buy their favourite product. Nor will it benefit the small business in Ballymena struggling to source produce from their supplier in Birmingham.”
What would make life easier for them, you failure at your one job, would be for the rest of the UK to accept alignment with EU standards.
The protocol has been hugely controversial in Northern Ireland, contributing to violence over Easter and fissures in the Democratic Unionist party, which is officially campaigning to have it scrapped, having helped enable this whole f.cking shitshow in the first place.
To continue to accept alignment with EU standards, as at the moment, they haven't diverged in most cases, and we all know that Brexit means no lowering of UK standards, as we have been told multiple times. :roll:
Anyone who wants to export to NI will anyway be obliged to maintain EU standards. Unless you prefer an NI/I border.
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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by Gfamily » Wed Jun 09, 2021 3:38 pm

shpalman wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 3:17 pm
jimbob wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 3:13 pm
shpalman wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 11:50 am
sausages



What would make life easier for them, you failure at your one job, would be for the rest of the UK to accept alignment with EU standards.

To continue to accept alignment with EU standards, as at the moment, they haven't diverged in most cases, and we all know that Brexit means no lowering of UK standards, as we have been told multiple times. :roll:
Anyone who wants to export to NI will anyway be obliged to maintain EU standards. Unless you prefer an NI/I border.
A particular point about chilled processed meat is that in the absence of a specific trade agreement. its importation into NI from any non member country is about to be prohibited - whether or not it would comply with EU standards
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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by Woodchopper » Wed Jun 09, 2021 3:53 pm

jimbob wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 3:13 pm
shpalman wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 11:50 am
sausages
that idiot David Frost wrote:“Further threats of legal action and trade retaliation from the EU won’t make life any easier for the shopper in Strabane who can’t buy their favourite product. Nor will it benefit the small business in Ballymena struggling to source produce from their supplier in Birmingham.”
What would make life easier for them, you failure at your one job, would be for the rest of the UK to accept alignment with EU standards.
The protocol has been hugely controversial in Northern Ireland, contributing to violence over Easter and fissures in the Democratic Unionist party, which is officially campaigning to have it scrapped, having helped enable this whole f.cking shitshow in the first place.
To continue to accept alignment with EU standards, as at the moment, they haven't diverged in most cases, and we all know that Brexit means no lowering of UK standards, as we have been told multiple times. :roll:
Unfortunately the UK following EU standards and remaining in the Customs Union was what Theresa May negotiated (albeit in a convoluted manner). That option was soundly rejected by almost everyone. II can't see any prospect for it being revived.

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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by IvanV » Wed Jun 09, 2021 4:56 pm

Woodchopper wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 3:53 pm
Unfortunately the UK following EU standards and remaining in the Customs Union was what Theresa May negotiated (albeit in a convoluted manner). That option was soundly rejected by almost everyone. II can't see any prospect for it being revived.
That's in the context of the time. The remainers wouldn't support it because it seemed harder than a consensus position. And the hard-ons correctly thought they could get away with pushing for something harder, given no deal was the back-stop position if they just stalled.

But I don't think you could normally expect to export a sausage into the EU unless you were in the single market. Otherwise you'd need a special deal. Switzerland has lots of special deals, negotiated over many years, and which the EU increasingly thinks was too generous to them. It might indeed be logical and sensible to do all sorts of trade deals with the EU. But the EU reserves many such privileges for those who are actually members, otherwise many more would leave. So this is a cake-and-eat-it type issue. We were thrown out of the single European energy market, although there are gains from trade for both sides, because that's a members-only (inc EFTA) privilege. Even the Swiss can't get in, even though all their hydro reservoirs are very useful for balancing demand in neighbouring countries.

South of the border, the Irish eat sausages largely of local manufacture, so far as I have observed. I don't think the minimum efficient scale is very large. What this is really about is the UK supermarkets wanting to provision their Northern Irish branches as part of their UK network, when the British government signed a deal that was evidently going to interfere with that. And a segment of Northern Irish society that wants to buy identifiably British goods.

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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by jimbob » Wed Jun 09, 2021 6:47 pm

Gfamily wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 3:38 pm
shpalman wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 3:17 pm
jimbob wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 3:13 pm


To continue to accept alignment with EU standards, as at the moment, they haven't diverged in most cases, and we all know that Brexit means no lowering of UK standards, as we have been told multiple times. :roll:
Anyone who wants to export to NI will anyway be obliged to maintain EU standards. Unless you prefer an NI/I border.
A particular point about chilled processed meat is that in the absence of a specific trade agreement. its importation into NI from any non member country is about to be prohibited - whether or not it would comply with EU standards
Which makes perfect sense from a biosecurity perspective
Have you considered stupidity as an explanation

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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by Little waster » Wed Jun 09, 2021 9:40 pm

shpalman wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 1:54 pm
From the live blog:

Every time he meets Lord Frost, new problems crop up. Some of them were foreseen, and some were not.
Just spit-balling some radical solutions here in the hope one of them might work but ... and hear me out ... next time Frost goes into one of these meetings how about he's accompanied by a bright 7 year old who has spent the last 30 minutes on wikipedia learning about the EU for the first time.

That way the UK negotiators will be approximately 1171.3% better prepared than they appear to be.

Crazy I know but it looks like our current strategy of letting our most significant geopolitical relationship be handled by a bunch of racist fuckwits, delusional lunatics and proven charlatans is working out about as exactly as well as we all expected it would.
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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by Millennie Al » Thu Jun 10, 2021 2:02 am

Woodchopper wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 12:28 pm
shpalman wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 11:50 am
sausages
that idiot David Frost wrote:“Further threats of legal action and trade retaliation from the EU won’t make life any easier for the shopper in Strabane who can’t buy their favourite product. Nor will it benefit the small business in Ballymena struggling to source produce from their supplier in Birmingham.”
If the Northern Ireland market is big enough, and with almost 2 million it should be, aren’t we just going to see the favourite brands set up production there? That would involve higher costs but I don’t really see how people are going to be permanently denied their favourite foods.
It would seem much more sensible for them to set up in the Republic of Ireland - that way they have a big market which won't be at risk of disappearing depending on the latest trade negotiations - if the border is in the Irish Sea, they can sell to Northern Ireland, Ireland, and all of the EU, while if the border develops between Ireland and Northern Ireland, the Northern Ireland market can be served from other UK factories leaving the Irish one to serve the EU. A factory in Northern Ireland would risk being made irrelevant if the border in the Irish Sea went away.

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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by Martin_B » Thu Jun 10, 2021 4:25 am

Woodchopper wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 12:28 pm
shpalman wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 11:50 am
sausages
that idiot David Frost wrote:“Further threats of legal action and trade retaliation from the EU won’t make life any easier for the shopper in Strabane who can’t buy their favourite product. Nor will it benefit the small business in Ballymena struggling to source produce from their supplier in Birmingham.”
If the Northern Ireland market is big enough, and with almost 2 million it should be, aren’t we just going to see the favourite brands set up production there? That would involve higher costs but I don’t really see how people are going to be permanently denied their favourite foods.
2 million is a big enough market in WA for there to be local producers of most foodstuffs, although they do have access to a market of ~24 million some 3000 km away and with the occasional restriction about what foodstuffs can be exported across state lines.
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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by Woodchopper » Thu Jun 10, 2021 4:49 am

Millennie Al wrote:
Thu Jun 10, 2021 2:02 am
Woodchopper wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 12:28 pm
shpalman wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 11:50 am
sausages

If the Northern Ireland market is big enough, and with almost 2 million it should be, aren’t we just going to see the favourite brands set up production there? That would involve higher costs but I don’t really see how people are going to be permanently denied their favourite foods.
It would seem much more sensible for them to set up in the Republic of Ireland - that way they have a big market which won't be at risk of disappearing depending on the latest trade negotiations - if the border is in the Irish Sea, they can sell to Northern Ireland, Ireland, and all of the EU, while if the border develops between Ireland and Northern Ireland, the Northern Ireland market can be served from other UK factories leaving the Irish one to serve the EU. A factory in Northern Ireland would risk being made irrelevant if the border in the Irish Sea went away.
That would be sensible. But as with everything else I assume that sausages are a symbol and part of the population won’t want to eat sausage with “made in Ireland” on the packet.

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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by Woodchopper » Thu Jun 10, 2021 6:54 am

Martin_B wrote:
Thu Jun 10, 2021 4:25 am
Woodchopper wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 12:28 pm
shpalman wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 11:50 am
sausages

If the Northern Ireland market is big enough, and with almost 2 million it should be, aren’t we just going to see the favourite brands set up production there? That would involve higher costs but I don’t really see how people are going to be permanently denied their favourite foods.
2 million is a big enough market in WA for there to be local producers of most foodstuffs, although they do have access to a market of ~24 million some 3000 km away and with the occasional restriction about what foodstuffs can be exported across state lines.
So Slovenia has a similar population and was 80 per cent self sufficient in meat products: https://edepot.wur.nl/16043

So it looks like Northern Ireland could make its own sausages, though perhaps at a higher price.

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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by lpm » Thu Jun 10, 2021 7:12 am

Why you aren't referring to them as emulsified high fat offal tubes I'll never know.
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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by Woodchopper » Thu Jun 10, 2021 7:51 am

lpm wrote:
Thu Jun 10, 2021 7:12 am
Why you aren't referring to them as emulsified high fat offal tubes I'll never know.
EHFOT just doesn't trip off the tongue.

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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by plodder » Thu Jun 10, 2021 8:28 am

bjn wrote:
Tue Jun 08, 2021 5:21 pm
Slightly off topic, but the austerity imposed on Greece collapsed huge chunks of the economy, yes some reforms were needed, but collapsing the economy was not the way to do it. Also, the EU/ECB/Germany were not innocent in the whole processes, they knew Greece was fudging the numbers mahoosively when they applied to join the Euro, and let them join anyway. They should bare some of the blame for the fiasco as their knowing actions led to unsustainable Greek private borrowing after they joined the Euro.
Too right. Those poor, innocent central bankers.

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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by plodder » Thu Jun 10, 2021 8:35 am

jimbob wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 6:47 pm
Gfamily wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 3:38 pm

A particular point about chilled processed meat is that in the absence of a specific trade agreement. its importation into NI from any non member country is about to be prohibited - whether or not it would comply with EU standards
Which makes perfect sense from a biosecurity perspective
It doesn't: "even if it complies with EU standards". Lets not pretend this is about biosecurity, it's about the EU being a closed shop to protect French farmers.

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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by plodder » Thu Jun 10, 2021 8:36 am

Woodchopper wrote:
Thu Jun 10, 2021 4:49 am
That would be sensible. But as with everything else I assume that sausages are a symbol and part of the population won’t want to eat sausage with “made in Ireland” on the packet.
A sensible producer would use UK pork, brand it in a Union Jack, call them "Boris Bangers" and have tiny 'made in ROI' writing.

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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by IvanV » Thu Jun 10, 2021 8:43 am

plodder wrote:
Thu Jun 10, 2021 8:35 am
... Lets not pretend this is about biosecurity, it's about the EU being a closed shop to protect French farmers.
Let's not pretend it's only the French who want to protect their farmers.

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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by Gfamily » Thu Jun 10, 2021 9:09 am

plodder wrote:
Thu Jun 10, 2021 8:35 am
jimbob wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 6:47 pm
Gfamily wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 3:38 pm

A particular point about chilled processed meat is that in the absence of a specific trade agreement. its importation into NI from any non member country is about to be prohibited - whether or not it would comply with EU standards
Which makes perfect sense from a biosecurity perspective
It doesn't: "even if it complies with EU standards". Lets not pretend this is about biosecurity, it's about the EU being a closed shop to protect French farmers.
How do you propose they ensure compliance with EU standards if you don't have an agreement to ensure compliance with EU standards?
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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by Allo V Psycho » Thu Jun 10, 2021 11:06 am

Apparently the US issued a diplomatic 'demarche' to the UK about the relationships between the UK, Ireland, and NI. Apparently a demarche is like a rebuke. The Times has it as the front page story. The Express and Telegraph commentators are foaming at the mouth, but I won't link to them (as an example the Telegraph says)
Joe Biden should keep his sneering anti-British, anti-Brexit views to himself
Before insulting the Prime Minister, the president should remember that people in the UK voted to leave the EU and take back control
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/biden- ... 021-06-09/

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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by Woodchopper » Thu Jun 10, 2021 11:14 am

Allo V Psycho wrote:
Thu Jun 10, 2021 11:06 am
Apparently the US issued a diplomatic 'demarche' to the UK about the relationships between the UK, Ireland, and NI. Apparently a demarche is like a rebuke. The Times has it as the front page story. The Express and Telegraph commentators are foaming at the mouth, but I won't link to them (as an example the Telegraph says)
Joe Biden should keep his sneering anti-British, anti-Brexit views to himself
Before insulting the Prime Minister, the president should remember that people in the UK voted to leave the EU and take back control
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/biden- ... 021-06-09/
A démarche is just a form of formal diplomatic communication. It isn't necessarily negative.

In this case the importance is its formality. Its a bit like the difference between someone's boss informally telling them that they have f.cked up, and the boss describing the f.ck up in a letter which then gets held on file.

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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by FlammableFlower » Thu Jun 10, 2021 1:43 pm

Allo V Psycho wrote:
Thu Jun 10, 2021 11:06 am
Apparently the US issued a diplomatic 'demarche' to the UK about the relationships between the UK, Ireland, and NI. Apparently a demarche is like a rebuke. The Times has it as the front page story. The Express and Telegraph commentators are foaming at the mouth, but I won't link to them (as an example the Telegraph says)
Joe Biden should keep his sneering anti-British, anti-Brexit views to himself
Before insulting the Prime Minister, the president should remember that people in the UK voted to leave the EU and take back control
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/biden- ... 021-06-09/
So the UK voted to (proverbially) curl out a big steaming one and everyone else has to respect that? Ah, good old exceptionalism.

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Re: Brexit Consequences

Post by plodder » Thu Jun 10, 2021 2:51 pm

Gfamily wrote:
Thu Jun 10, 2021 9:09 am
How do you propose they ensure compliance with EU standards if you don't have an agreement to ensure compliance with EU standards?
By already having compliance with EU standards? The ban could apply to the UK when we change our standards.

eta this is what will probably come out in the wash.

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