My Monday Moan is free of the €700 import charge
Don’t read this if you are/were in favour of Brexit and don’t want to hear some home truths about the consequences. Things like believing the NHS would get millions per week, you’d be running through sunny uplands (whatever that’s meant to mean) and the lies about trade deals, oven-ready or otherwise. Luckily for all of us, Neil has supplied some beautiful photos of Symi to lighten my Monday morning mood, so you can always look at them and ignore the text.
Today’s advice. Don’t order anything online and have it sent directly to me. Certainly not cheese, horse feed or football shirts, not that I need the latter two, and I can buy cheese here at the moment. I’d also be wary of sending anything from the yUK to Europe right now as couriers may refuse to deal with your parcel. If you’re thinking of sending a gift to friends abroad, then think again or tread carefully. The likelihood is, us over here will either have to pay a massive import tax to collect it, or we’ll have to refuse to take it, and it will be sent back and possibly burnt. Sadly, I am not making this up or scaremongering. That’s how it currently is with the yUK’s ‘oven-ready’ trade deal with the EU. Ironic really, as some exports are being burned and, thus, really are ready for the oven.
To back up my wildly outlandish statement: A small business that makes and exports cheese from Cheshire… has lost 20% of his sales overnight after discovering he needed to provide a £180 health certificate on retail orders to consumers in the EU, including those buying personal gift packs of his award-winning wax-wrapped cheese worth £25 or £30.
To save his business, he will now have to switch a £1m investment he was planning to make in a new distribution centre in Macclesfield to the EU, with the loss of 20 jobs and tax revenue to the UK.
Meanwhile, in another part of the newspaper: British businesses that export to the continent are being encouraged by government trade advisers to set up separate companies inside the EU in order to get around extra charges, paperwork and taxes resulting from Brexit. (My emphasis, simply because… Well, honestly! What a shambles.)
Oh, here’s another one and it’s to do with books: [A Berlin publisher] said that, as a result of new rules, regulations and costs resulting from Brexit, it had decided not to export any more books to the UK at all, not even ‘111 Reasons to Love England.’
As you can gather from today’s post, I can find few reasons to love England right now, and by England, I mean the whole of the UK, though it seems those blithering about in Westminster sometimes forget that it is a united queendom.
Anyway, I’ve got that out of my system, and really, I just wanted to warn against posting things from the yUK to friends and family in the EU unless you check carefully what extra charges may be incurred (at either end). Brexit, eh? A gift that keeps on giving. Thank the stars for Neil’s photos.
