Brexit the economy and house prices part 7: Brexit Harder

Herzlos

So what do people think about this pallet nonsense? Apparently it was know about by business 18 months ago (I've lost the link).



https://www.businessinsider.com/brexit-michael-gove-ministers-to-hold-emergency-meeting-over-no-deal-chaos-2019-2?r=US&IR=T


Basically, there are strict rules on shipping pallets for the WTO, mostly about preventing spread of contamination. We don't need to follow them when in the single market because we're not trading on WTO terms. We've already got some pallets for WTO trade, but not enough to cover WTO + EU if the EU trade goes to WTO terms. We can get some but they'll take a few weeks to produce and will cost more.


Just another little detail a competent government would have known about already.



An unattributed quote sums brexit up pretty well: "It is the tiny, procedural, mundane-seeming stuff that will absolutely trip people up". We're very much into the stage where all of this stuff is going to start being problematic.

Tromking

Herzlos wrote: »

May triggered A50 far too early, as some sort of botched power play.

The botched power play was the 2017 General Election. Brexit ended on that there election night.:)

andrewf75

Herzlos wrote: »

May triggered A50 far too early, as some sort of botched power play.

I’m not sure they triggered A50 too early. The NI situation alone should have determined very quickly that a “soft” Brexit was the only realistic way to go. There would have been huge parliamentary support and a significant majority of public support – albeit some anger as well. The idea that only a “hard” Brexit is a proper Brexit only developed after May made all these ridiculous promises, which she should have known she couldn’t keep. Now, most leavers do think only a hard Brexit is a proper Brexit, but this was not always the case.

So had they decided on this path relatively quickly with parliamentary debates/votes, A50 could have been triggered in half the time and you’d really only have the ERG obstructing things. I think also with a clear intention to deliver Brexit but remain close (genuinely, not this “deep and meaningful partnership” nonsense) the negotiations would have been a lot more constructive.

I’m not saying a soft Brexit/BINO is perfect and I fully get the opposition to it, but the reality is it’s the only course of action that could have avoided the problems which may ultimately stop Brexit.

Malthusian

Pallets. That's what we're reduced to. From mass unemployment, recession and an Emergency Budget to panicking about pallets.

Economic meltdown ain't what it used to be.

Herzlos

Malthusian wrote: »

Pallets. That's what we're reduced to. From mass unemployment, recession and an Emergency Budget to panicking about pallets.

Economic meltdown ain't what it used to be.

It's one of literally hundreds of little things we didn't realise we'd need to do, and which make a hard Brexit more of a disaster. If we go hard Brexit, we may be unable to export anything to the EU until the pallets became available. That'd really, really hurt us economically. Can you imagine a recession brought on because no-one realised we'd need to ship goods on different bits of wood?

mayonnaise

I have the fullest confidence in the Great British Pallet.
After all, we won the war.

movilogo

If we go hard Brexit, we may be unable to export anything to the EU until the pallets became available.

So we can't import then either? If we can import then we can reuse those pallets for exporting

Arklight

Enterprise_1701C wrote: »

Spain get plenty of special treatment. They get away with blockading the border with Gibraltar, supposedly within the eu, they get away with fishing above their quotas, they get away with trying to tell British boats that they are in Spanish waters when they are docked in Gibraltar, have not noticed any admonishments from the eu. And we are supposedly still within the eu, so all these could be classed as internal eu matters.

The eu would probably treat them quite differently if the above is anything to go by.

How would the British act if Hayling Island was occupied by the Spanish? The Spanish actions are annoying and designed to appeal to their own version of red faced permanently enraged Daily Mail readers, but nothing else.

That's within the EU. Things may well change dramatically when we leave and the UK becomes a, relatively weak, international power trying to maintain possession of a part of Europe. In fact, I would say Gibraltar being British looks about as viable as Hong Kong being so.

The Gibraltar and Northern Ireland problems (which is what they are) are simply the consequences of having a colonial legacy with no remaining colonial clout.

Arklight

mayonnaise wrote: »

I have the fullest confidence in the Great British Pallet.
After all, we won the war.

It's ok. With our plucky British pluck there will be an army of Brexiters rolling their sleeves up and banging away in their "little sheds" to knock up all the pallets needed to rescue our stranded tubes of Pringles from the shores of Dunkirk.

It will live in legend forever.

Herzlos

movilogo wrote: »

So we can't import then either? If we can import then we can reuse those pallets for exporting

We can import freely and re-use those pallets to go back out. Sounds simple, yeah? Do you propose we remove everything from WTO pallets at Dover and re-pallet them before the onward journey? How much time/money is that going to cost?

Or do we just wait until they reach their destination and can be re-used? What if the goods sit on pallets for weeks/months?


I dare say the same must apply to the EU too, I'd be surprised if they were using WTO pallets for UK bound goods. It's a matter of percentages though, we'd need to scrounge up a much higher % of pallets than the EU would.