Baffling Brexit rules threaten export chaos | Hacker News Reader

Baffling Brexit rules threaten export chaos

theguardian.com

57 pointsBluestein58 comments

several freight-forwarding/logistics companies in my country are pulling their trucks from going to the UK (Schenker is just one of many). It's too much hassle for them. My friend works for a mid-size logistic company where their trucks still go to UK but he reckons it's a big risk even in the short-term because drivers will not put up with it and leave the company. (note: well paid long distance truckers do not exist anymore)

For those who believe the market will fix it: Well paid drivers no longer exist. The last time he has seen a local work as truck driver was in mid-2000 and meanwhile salaries have dropped to ~€700 and less therefore only some Eastern Europeans can justify that working as a driver still makes sense for them. There is not much wiggle room left in terms of just paying better salaries - even smaller freight-forwarders are asking themselves whether it continues to go there (at least for now).

He is also not happy about having historically taken care of UK freight business and that he should just roll with it. He says all the customs/declaration headache with the UK is now not different than being in charge of shipping to Uzbekistan or Russia, and he can't see profits for them in the UK market only risks which especially are a bitter pill for smaller freight-forwarders.

What makes it worse is that UK customers have a high level of expectations of services. Their service industry has always been put on a pedestal especially when comparing themselves to France/Germany/etc, ... people expect cheap, fast and highly tailored to the customer. That was already hard before, and it's going to become impossible now to satisfy the expectations. As an example pre-Brexit, he had a truck go there on Monday and it was supposed to return by the next morning with a full load (booked for the way back). Now the same trucks return empty and also are stuck frequently, sometimes a whole week because even locals don't understand the paperwork. And truckers had enough of pissing into bottles too. It's a huge risk for UK businesses when the costs of the supply chain become hard to predict.

But why don't they just warehouse more stock? They have like everyone today a JIT supply-chain and there isn't any storage to stock up. These warehouses would literally have to be built.

> For those who believe the market will fix it: Well paid drivers no longer exist. The last time he has seen a local work as truck driver was in mid-2000 and meanwhile salaries have dropped to ~€700 and less therefore only some Eastern Europeans can justify that working as a driver still makes sense for them. There is not much wiggle room left in terms of just paying better salaries - even smaller freight-forwarders are asking themselves whether it continues to go there (at least for now).

Which is probably, in part, why Brexit happened. Think about it - this is a career that used to provide fairly well-paid jobs to British people, but EU rules around access to our trucking market meant that wages were driven down so much that the only people who can do that work are Eastern Europeans based in countries with much lower cost of living. And the response of the British elite, including our press, was to insist that this didn't happen, that working class people were just brainwashed into blaming the EU because they were too stupid to realise it was their own damn fault they didn't have jobs. There's comments along those lines in almost every HN discussion of Brexit, including the other one that's on the front page right now.

At the time of the referendum, there was [as usual] a massive shortage of UK-based HGV/LGV drivers, 89% of whom were British with an average age of nearly 50, and pay had just gone up 5%. [1]http://www.repgraph.co.uk/files/reports/The%20driver%20short...

The only bit that might be dominated by Eastern Europeans is the super long haul trips from Europe that Brexit is significantly reducing...

I do agree that claims about how Britons couldn't get careers in lorry driving due to massive influxes of foreigners probably helped influence the result, but such claims would have been as fundamentally dishonest as the claims about leaving funding the NHS.

So, why aren't these high paying trucking jobs reappearing now that Brexit happened? And if this were somehow a EU problem, why aren't the trucking firms making bank off of all that cheap Eastern European labor?

We could ask the same of the rest of the world economy after large parts of China were locked down at the beginning of the pandemic and people wondered where to buy masks and ventillators. Infrastructure and jobs are slower to appear than opportunity because capital is required upfront and the skills can't be downloaded, they must be trained or moved in.

Long term this kind of thing will lead to new jobs and decent wages that force technological innovation because businesses and the politicians they employ can't push costs down by importing cheap labour. Or, as the Guardian would probably predict, Britain will run out of food and people will starve.

Which do you think is more likely?

> Long term this kind of thing will lead to new jobs and decent wages that force technological innovation because businesses and the politicians they employ can't push costs down by importing cheap labour.

It would make me happy to be wrong but I envision even more inequality as a result of brexit. I just don't see it playing out in any way that would result in an objectively better quality of life for working people. Ironic how I, a highly paid immigrant, am concerned for their future.

> I envision even more inequality as a result of brexit

It's certainly possible but since inequality has risen since 1979[1], which correlates rather well with the UK's membership of the EU it might be hard to convince Brexit voters that they've made a mistake on that, especially at this early stage. I'm sure someone will be tempted to pipe up with "evil Tories!" or "Thatcher" but they'll have to contend with all the quotes from staunch Labour politicians against the EU (in whatever guise it was in at the time), let alone explaining how joining the project coincided with the slow down of the post war narrowing of inequality and did nothing to stop it increasing later.

> I just don't see it playing out in any way that would result in an objectively better quality of life for working people

Don't forget the sovereignty bit, one of the reasons the remain argument failed to resonate with so many was because it focused purely on economics (partly because of the weakness of that for remainers, partly because it reflects interests). Given what you say, that inequality continues to rise just as it was previously then to regain sovereignty will be a big win.

[1] https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/how-has-inequality-changed

I doubt people will starve, but I would expect imported goods (including food) will be more expensive, and local perishable foodstuffs that are unpopular and hard to export will get very cheap.

Maybe the English need to develop a taste for whelks.

> So, why aren't these high paying trucking jobs reappearing now that Brexit happened?

In the last couple of weeks? While the entire world is closed due to Corona?

Regardless, high paying truck driving jobs are long gone. There is more chance of driverless trucks in the next 10 years than a return to well paying jobs.

Same as high paying manufacturing jobs in Detroit.

If the problem is indeed that truckers are refusing certain economically important trips because they would be uneconomical to them (and I have no idea whether that is true), it seems to me that this is an entirely legitimate question:

* There is demand for the trip to happen.

* The truck exists

* The driver exists

* It is legal for the trip to happen

* So why isn't there a market clearing wage at which the trip happens?

There is no demand for the trip to happen at that price.

Hence this will produce high inflation on imported goods, especially on basic necessities.

Hence this will make the average British poor citizen.. poorer.

Wage rates are sticky. Many employers are used to paying very cheap labour costs.

You see this in agriculture too, where owners will sometimes let crops rot in the fields rather than risk setting a precedent for higher wages for pickers.

One would think that with the proliferation of gig economy arrangements, employers would get used to the concept of "surge pricing". Sadly not, it seems.

It had years of preparation time, you'd think some company would start finding a workforce for a post Brexit world.

> It had years of preparation time

Preparation for (unspecified) 'treaty' or 'no-treaty' or what?

If cheap Eastern European competition was the cause of the decrease in pay, the kind of treaty shouldn't matter much. The competition is gone, the companies will now be forced to pay a solid British wage.

Rebuilding an industry takes time, those resources that was previously allocated to this industry is now allocated elsewhere and need to reallocate again. Also the expertise that is required to run a business like this is either gone or doing something else.

Yeah, there's some fairly difficult (and somewhat expensive) training and testing involved in being a HGV driver. As I understand it, one of the ways the EU helped Eastern European truckers outcompete local ones is that they could use their own countries' HGV licenses to do deliveries that were entirely within the UK and didn't have to go to the hassle and expense of getting a UK one. (Wouldn't be surprised if there was something of a race to the bottom in licensing too.)

You seem frame it like some kind of EU conspiracy to destroy UK, but what would be the alternative? Have every truck driver have the license for every country they go through or deliver to?

Can you imagine how much of a pain it would be for a truck driver to keep up 10+ licenses and for the logistics people to plan things when only some drivers can go to only some countries?

Also, if the required knowledge is the same, why is getting UK license so much more of a hassle than in other countries?

I don't think he was ascribing any kind of malice to the EU. You can do something sensible that still has negative repercussions.

While HGV driving is certainly a skill, the difficulty level has come down quite a bit in the last 50 years. My dad used to drive an ERF LV with no power steering and a 9 speed unsynchronized gear box. Now most trucks drive like a very large car, automatic gearbox or, at the very least, a ZF fully synchronised gearbox.

To be honest, this is not something that would happen overnight. I don't think it will happen, but it's too early to say

Maybe they will? I think somebody will still ship stuff to the UK. Or are the predictions coming true and the British people will now starve to death because of the EU trade embargo?

Lots of firms and the banks that own and fund them have been making a killing out of exploiting us Eastern Europeans, actually. All of this while enforcing privatisations, austerity and deregulation in our countries to force us to accept such low wages, both abroad and at home.

The high paying jobs won’t come back without class struggle. Just because the periphery of the EU was pillaged to such an extreme doesn’t mean the working class in the centre wasn’t exploited too.

Bigger risks, bigger profits. We did great before the EU and will do great after the EU.

"We did great before the EU"

When? In the late 1800s?

We joined the EC in 1973 partly due to falling behind economically to Western European powers within

The UK did not do great before the EU. In the 1960s it was considered the "sick man of Europe". That was the reason they wanted to join the EEC in the first place (and were refused twice by De Gaulle).

Yes, the man had his flaws but he was dead right on what to expect of people. He was right about the US and the UK.

"Ministers must restart trade negotiations with Brussels immediately to sort out the 'baffling' array of post-Brexit rules and regulations that now threaten much of the UK’s export trade to the EU, leading business groups have said.

Amid mounting anger among UK firms at cross-border friction they were told would not exist, British manufacturing and trade organisations met Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove in an emergency session on Thursday to discuss problems resulting from the deal struck by Boris Johnson with the EU before Christmas."

I fear the British public are learning too late that the finger needs the hand rather more than the hand needs the finger.

is it just me or is this article completely devoid of information? I just woke up and all but it feels like I just read the same paragraph or two repeatedly reworded

There is indeed no information in this article, but that doesn't mean there is information behind it (see links and other articles).

Import/Export stopped overnight for many companies, goods started being stopped at the border and slapped with very high tariff.

Long story short, if you buy a cheap thing from amazon Germany/France, it might very well come to your door with an additional £30 in VAT and handling fees. Hence many companies stopped shipping overnight.

The problem is the worst for supermarket and perishable, see many news about cargos stuck at the border and expiring. The UK relies very heavily on imported food. It's really scary if we can't import food anymore and grocers are going bankrupt with cargo rotting at the borders.

Amazon is a bad example, because they already have processes in place to pay the VAT and customs fees and include them in the amount you pay up front - at least when the items come from Amazon warehouses - which they originally used when shipping from places like the US. This isn't exactly a new problem, it's more or less just extending the same rules that apply to sales to and from the rest of the world to a few more countries. (Not that you'd likely know any of this from the coverage in the UK press - they've all got a bit of an axe to grind over Brexit and it shows.)

Louis Rossmann did a video recently on the silly way the UK handles import tax: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar_7Z-MzPv8

Yep, a lot of this isn't true. Unfortunately, there is a ton of misinformation on this topic (almost no-one in Britain has experience ordering things from outside EU). So...

No, you won't have to pay anything with Amazon. I ordered something from Germany last week, no extra fees.

No, there are no tariffs. There are VAT charges and potentially fees, although in almost all cases this is unlikely, that isn't the same thing as a tariff.

No, import/export has not stopped overnight. What has happened is that demand for certain products went through the roof this year, this has created massive issues in shipping with lots of containers ending up nowhere near where they are needed. The same issues are occurring, although to a lesser extent, in the EU. Freight costs into the Felixstowe are up 5x though, this will correct as time goes on but it will be a while (this issue is global but is particularly severe in the UK because our consumer economy is relatively large).

No, there is no issue with food supply. Frantic articles in tabloids about the food supply are constant, they were printed when people bought newspapers, they used to happen every few years when truckers striked, these stories sell but that is their only purpose. Where I am, food supply has improved significantly since earlier this year, that is going to be the case for most of the UK...with one exception, NI. They are still in the EU trading area but do most of their trade with the UK, they were sold down the river by everyone (there were some people who pointed out this was going to happen, that advice wasn't regarded).

Saying the UK relies heavily on imported food is...reductive. The UK relies heavily on imported food and also produces a lot of food for export. That is why some EU markets have shortages in certain products. The what and where is more important. The UK imports food from outside the EU, generally many countries imported food from outside FTA areas (and the UK and the EU are in an FTA). This is not something to panic about.

And generally, these rules applied to many countries outside the EU without FTAs. They are not prohibitive, they are not the end of trade. This is how most trade is done globally.

I think the second lorry park being build in Kent means that the troubles are not that temporary (especially for Kent people). Also either the UK governement still hasn't hired near enough customs agents, either the training was so horrendously planned it's shamefull (especially when you compare to NL and FR customs agents).

There is a fresh food issue in the UK, salads and tomatoes especially. Maybe you don't eat salads so you did not notice until its tomatoes that are hard to find on the shelf.

My cousins that are exporting some medium-quality wine (10 to 25€/bottle) to the UK seems to be fine, there will be a price hike that can cut some of their british customers but the chineese market seems to open up for them so they won't rely on UK export anymore.

Do you have data for that claim about food import/export? The data I found suggests that even if 100% of the export production went to domestic use there would still be a shortfall requiring imports and I’d imagine that is even more significant if you looked seasonally:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/food-statistics-p...

It's an article in The Guardian that's critical of Brexit. You're not supposed to actually read it, just skim the headline, have that confirm how terrible post-Brexit life will be and then carry on with the rest of your day with a feeling of moral-superiority over the plebs who voted for Brexit.

I am curious, what other British newspapers would you recommend for seeing a different perspective at Brexit?

Welcome to the Guardian. Remainers are in denial: Brexit has happened, the world hasn't ended so all these articles are going to be of the "I told you so" variety...without the evidence.

It is unfortunate because the trade situation is actually pretty interesting but no-one is really covering it (they are just doing lots of articles about fish...a turnaround from a few months ago when they were appalled that fish was so important).

fuel chaos, not threaten chaos.

I found my new motto!

On the 1st the dailymail went down to the ports and had a big picture on their homepage that there was no chaos. On a public holiday... Yes, of course, there as no chaos that day, there was no real traffic.

All this chaos was warned for years and a last minute bad deal just made is a sure thing. Honestly, I hope the little Englanders feel the pain, I just feel bad for everyone who voted no and/or changed their minds when the reality of things kicked in. Turns out taking back the borders actually results in there being a proper border again.

Sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.

If only someone could have foreseen this and warned people before the Brexit vote...

#Edit: I probably should have said that I was responding to this quote in particular, which made me angry:

“Johnson assured Northern Ireland business owners in November 2019 that they would have “unfettered access” to the rest of the UK. “There will be no forms, no checks, no barriers of any kind,” he said. If anyone told them they needed to fill in forms, “tell them to ring up the PM and I will direct them to throw that form in the bin.””

I understand the downvotes, some people think of politics like sports, they pick a team and they support it and they don’t like it when someone trash talks their team.

#End Edit

The prime minister, Boris Johnson, is a lying idiot who’s popularity appears to stem from being a bit funny when he appeared on a TV quiz show 10 years ago and his cabinet are either corrupt or unbelievably incompetent. They’ve completely screwed up Brexit, COVID and who knows what else in the year they’ve been in power. The one thing that a British private school education excels at above all else is giving its students absolute confidence in themselves, which seems to have led to a kind of Dunning-Kruger perfect storm at the heart of government.

Here’s one example: Every ministerial position Grant Shapps has had has involved him getting ‘swindled’ out of hundreds of millions of taxpayers money, or completely screwing up something important like the train timetables for the whole of Britain.

If its not incompetence then it’s corruption, which is something we like to pretend doesn’t happen in Britain, but maybe we need to take another look at ourselves. Continuing to hold the idea that as a nation we somehow are immune from it is ridiculously naive at this point.

Who could have possibly seen this coming?

:-) me. This is what the UK asked for with the brexit.

And half of Britain and anyone with half a brain.

This is a work in progress and all the article contains is a couple of cherry picked quotes. No surprise there since the Guardian has been lobbying heavily against brexit.

Let's not forget artists that are also hit roughtly by Brexit.

A good text by Fish "How Brexit Has Destroyed UK Artists’ Ability To Tour In The EU" [0]

[0] https://www.facebook.com/derek.dick/posts/10157827728953587

The horror!

Sarcasm aside, I doubt you'll elicit any sympathy from the working class Brexit voters because elite artists are inconvenienced. Those I know are happy with the outcome even knowing the current disruptions.

It's not just elite artists though. I know plenty of small folk artists that tour Europe regularly as there's plenty of interest over there. Usually they can chain a few festivals across the Netherlands, Belgium, and France with smaller gigs as well. These are people who already survive on an extremely low margin of profitability, and every single one voted against brexit. And it's not like the UK is going to magically replace that income, what with the collapse of half the smaller festivals due to covid.

The elite artists aren’t having trouble. It’s the tiny bands making $1k a gig at little venues that get hurt here.

It's literally going to hurt the future of music/art that has working class roots more than it will that of people who can afford to go longer without making money before finding success.

To frame it like the person you replied to did, as working class people vs. elite artists, is incredibly shortsighted.

I'm not against off-topic responses, but going around every thread on the subject you can find to paste exactly the same thing isn't really in the spirit of discussion here, as far as I can see.

Would you happen to have a non-Facebook link? I can't see it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com