During the year that is ending, the images of empty British supermarket shelves or – in early autumn – the picture of petrol stations without fuel, with lines of motorists waiting, have served to illustrate well the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union. Even more, the queues of thousands of stranded trucks with goods trying to cross or leave Great Britain.
Callum Henderson, from the importing company Great Oil UK, which buys Andalusian olive oil, explained it three months ago in great detail. In Euronews, he described the multiplication of obstacles of all kinds that have made this product more expensive for consumers in his country, in addition to making the import process difficult and complex: before, everything lasted two weeks, between the punctual demand and the arrival of the oil to your business; now, that commercial action is delayed almost two months. Henderson described it very neatly. I summarize here only the most significant details:
-Presentation of documents prior to importation, through the CHIEF system (Customs Handling of Import & Export Freight), to which you have to pay 200 pounds per month, although – be careful – your registration in the CHIEF does not guarantee that your commercial action is possible without more.
-Previously, the applicant must be registered with the HMRC (Her Majesty Revenue and Customs), but if you want the CHIEF to work properly it is better to hire a third party, a commercial agent, to whom you must pay £ 125 per order. “This is documentation that is required by the British government, not the EU,” Henderson clarifies.
-More: the transport company and logistics that I used before Brexit, have stopped working in the United Kingdom, so they had to change. Those who replaced him have raised the price 76%; they now charge £ 485 to transport each pallet or pallet.
-The deadline for registering and obtaining pallets in Spain has also been delayed by three weeks; customs permits, more than two weeks. As the oil does not have customs recharges, it needs additional time for an additional control of each import.
-These delays cause periodic emptying of the stored merchandise. Before there was always a reserve for the usual flow with your own customers. Henderson sums up that stage lapidary: «No stock = zero sales & negative cash flow».
-Within the United Kingdom, the difficulties of land transport have also increased between the logistics center of Nottingham (England) to the headquarters of Great Oil UK (in Scotland). “Pallets take 17 days, longer than from Spain,” Henderson sums up.
This concrete example alone explains the impacts of Brexit, regardless of Boris Johnson’s nationalist propaganda. There are others, let’s continue.
The first of January will be a year since the exit of the United Kingdom from the EU became executive. In reality, the transition period proved misleading for the British, perhaps with the exception of the increased visibility of rising tensions in Northern Ireland. Until the beginning of 2021, things seemed to flow, according to the impression of the brexiters. However, Brexit has now been joined by the pandemic that Boris Johnson himself began despising until he was about to die himself from the coronavirus.
Today it is a fact that breaking ties with the main trading partner has not been free. The result is various shortages, supply problems and bureaucratic magma for companies that trade with Europe. In addition, there is a tightening of the entry conditions of European workers, who have been a cheap labor for many sectors. They depended on them. As of January 1, 2021, EU citizens cannot seek employment in the UK if they do not have a work visa. In principle, only certain categories of skilled workers can aspire to achieve this, which is not the case with many manual jobs that do not require special skills. The most notable thing is the lack of 100,000 truckers to return to normalize the distribution of goods, but there are also a lack of workers in other sectors: in catering, in the health system (in the midst of a pandemic), in construction and in various manufacturing sectors.
In certain cases, business demands to allow Eastern European workers to enter – who were the majority and common in some branches – now hit a wall. A European correspondent quotes a food business entrepreneur who is asked by the Administration for £ 537 to register each individual work visa application. And they don’t assure you of an answer within two months. Nor can the accepted candidate aspire to have a contract that goes much beyond the first weeks of 2022, while few Britons accept those jobs that until recently were largely filled by Poles. In the UK, some estimates put 1.2 million jobs at the end of November that can be filled by local labor.
Other sectors, such as fishermen, are still hanging on the old fantasies that they were promised: that of canceling all the fishing quotas of their European colleagues in British waters. In the face of Johnson’s negotiating arrogance, France is threatening to prevent the unloading at Normandy ports of fish from ships registered on the islands of Jersey and Guernessey. Johnson even mobilized his patrol boats, as a deterrent, which caused the ire of Paris, which in turn threatened to cut the electricity supply to the aforementioned islands (very close to the French coast). In any case, British fishermen have already found that the ‘ocean of opportunity’ promised by Boris Johnson does not exist.
The threat, perhaps the worst, is that these tensions, in principle purely commercial, are a shadow on the peace accords in Northern Ireland, due to the reluctance of the Northern Irish Protestant parties, parliamentary allies of the London Conservatives: those Northern Irish ultras They do not want to accept EU controls on their coast so that – as a counterpart – the land border between the two Ireland can be kept open. They consider it an alien foot – from the EU, therefore also from the Republic of Ireland – between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
All that tension translates into greater difficulties in resolving all the conflicts that Johnson seems unable to avoid or does not want to avoid in order to get away from his own political and personal scandals, from his unstable management of the pandemic. London’s domestic politics continually interferes with the desirable sanity of negotiations with the EU and the next steps to be taken by both parties. It is thus also more difficult for British products to reach the market as before continental European.
And all the changes that Brexit requires, which in turn can alter the policy of customs duties or that already very convoluted bureaucracy, have not yet arrived. The problem is that all of this can also affect us – whether we like it or not – those of us who are still EU citizens. The lies with which the UK’s anti-Europeans won the referendum are now exploding in the faces of their supporters and voters. Happy New Year, Brexiters !
