Of course, selling to the UK (and Switzerland) is a pain in the ass and therefore we don't ship to those countries.
Just an anecdote of how disunity within Europe affects small businesses and customers.
Given the transition period the UK has been going through with the country still effectively in the EU without being a member state, I’d have thought it would be the same exporting to the UK as any other EU state, at least until the end of the year.
Surely you’d have to wait until 2021 to feel any pain unless I’m missing something?
EDIT: Also, I’m fascinated. Are you allowed to market your product as “cheese” under EU regulations? From what I understand they’re quite strict on what constitutes basic foodstuffs like cheese. The dairy industry has lobbied hard against this sort of thing.
Unfortunately, the product can't be called "cheese" (or "plant-based cheese" for that matter). Currently, "cheese alternative" seems to be fine as there's one precedent (in Germany at least) where a plant-based cheese company won the case. My understanding is that it's ok to talk about "cheese" on your website, but when the customer makes the buying decision it needs to be made clear that this is a cheese alternative.
Honestly, there are no clear guidelines here and the law is very fuzzy. It's a big pain in the ass, especially for a small company like ours with little resources to spend for unnecessary, zero value-adding legal actitivies like these.
It seems likely that post-Brexit UK is in full control of how easy it is for things to be imported in to the UK. They don't need a deal with Europe to influence that. Countries have near-unilateral control over imports (although an exception can be made to that principle for military tech).
So this sort of thing is an example of why the UK voters decided to leave - a bit more control over what is entering the country.
If the UK wants to make it easy to import German Cheese they can just let people bring German cheese over the border. Pay with $US.
As far as I can tell,tthe wto allows you to have two tariffs, one for counties for whom you have a deal and another for everyone else.
Thread ancestor was pointing out he likes having a big market to sell in to. I sympathise. And I really like the sound of the no-tariff low regulation UK cheese market, I'd vote for that if I were in the UK. But, and this is the focus for me in context of the article, these restriction are fully in the control of the UK and have very little to do with the success and failure of an EU-UK deal. It is simply a basic and well established observation that regulation makes it harder to run a business.
The argument in favour of accounting regulations is that the costs imposed are acceptable for the risks to the public of lax accounting practices, not that it reduces costs. Much like how the argument in favour of silly cheese regulations is that protecting the public from the wrong type of mouldy cheese is worth not having shafyy running a cheese operation in the UK.
I'm no expert, but I'll go out on a limb and say definitively that no Brexit proponent listed "no German Cheeses" on their manifesto. This is a retconned explanation.
Now, it's true that in principle that nations want some control over imports somewhere. But the point of the post above is that most of the time you don't, and exiting a free trade agreement means that many of those goods suddenly stop being available locally due to simple regulatory friction.
So, the UK can't say they don't want to import German cheese. Once they allow any foreign cheese into their market, the MFN rule means they have to allow all foreign cheese into the market. Likewise, if they wanted to ban German cheese, they'd also have to ban cheeses from everywhere else. The only situation in which they'd be able to allow one country's cheese and not the other is if they had a comprehensive free-trade agreement or a customs union... you know, the exact sort of thing that they just left.
Anyway based on polling, that's not why (a slim majority of) UK voters voted leave (except for controlling which people can enter, not which cheese). Lies about NHS funding and the like were a larger reason.
>So this sort of thing is an example of why the UK voters decided to leave
UK voters voted because of the high levels of immigration. Without that the leave campaign would have lost by a wide margin.
That is all pretty normal for a country though and the UK is the same.
Your point about immigration is correct though.
I agree the UK is more fragile as a result, which is part of why I have moved to Berlin.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d5/Un...
Another personal example: how VAT is treated on EU grants is different in every nation, despite EC directives supposedly mandating consistency.
Oh and legal signatures are also different across the 27 states - eg Poland does not accept them in any form, but organisations representing the EC often require them.
EU Harmonisation for my startup feels mythical. Wish it weren't so.
Is that really true though? To my understanding, there are still laws such as the European packaging & packaging waste legislation (PPWD) that require registration in each country you're selling to. The exact law differs from nation to nation as well, so you still require knowledge about each jurisdiction before you can safely sell to other EU members.
Also, while sending products directly to consumers shouldn't be much of an issue, I would imagine that there is some re-packaging / re-labeling needed if you'd actually want to have your German product in the supermarkets of Spain.
Yes, if you sell to supermarket in Spain there would be more admin stuff that you need to get done first.
I felt like I was on-set for Koyaanisqatsi.
For such a dense and large city London has a surpising number of public parks.
And in UK, when you talk about "immigrants", you really need to distinguish which historic wave of immigration, in which socioeconomic class, from which region. Especially EU versus non-EU.
("Educated" in this context means having been run through the educational system, not more intelligent.)
I'm not saying one way or the other which side is right but they're certainly related.
It was the North and Midlands that voted to leave - because their towns are not seeing the development and wealth that London got.
> The infinite variety of French cheeses — one of the finest achievements of French culture — is gradually being eroded and dumbed down. Only one in ten of the cheeses now consumed in France is made with raw-milk or “lait cru” in the authentic manner.
> Search where you like in the finest cheese shops in France, you will no longer find a Bleu de Termignon or a Galette des Monts-d’Or. They are among 50 species of French cheese that have vanished, like rare flowers or butterflies, in the last 40 years. Other varieties, like Vacherin d’Abondance and M. Michelin’s hand-made Mont d’Or have been reduced to a single producer.
1. It's not clear that's happening because of EU action.
2. It's not clear that's a bad thing (varieties are disappearing because people aren't buying thrm, right?)
3. The EU actually often hets criticised for being _too_ protective of foodstuff variations with their DOC laws.
But if you do want me to speak about the EU then yes, I would argue that a neoliberal project such as the EU helps bring consolidiation and makes for big winners (both corporations and countries) at the expense of smaller entities (again, corporations and countries). We have seen this with the EU, with Germany and its industrial corporations winning at the expense of Spain, Portugal, Greece, etc and their industrial corporations losing.