Why? There is no reasonable cause to believe that simply because the UK no longer wants to be a part of the EU that its goods that it exports have somehow declined to third world standards. That seems to be a bad faith reaction to the UK’s desire to leave.
The UK is not Nicaragua. Unless something drastically changes, I have no problem with the United States relying on the good faith of the UK government to ensure that its exports are safe; why should the EU be different?
(A) Because the UK has withdrawn from the mechanisms under which standards are ensured and enforced. The UK is no longer committed to maintaining the regulatory standards required by the EU, and has withdrawn from the monitoring/enforcement mechanisms that ensure this. Given that, it’s obviously unreasonable for the UK to expect to be afforded preferential treatment which is only given to states which make that commitment, and participate in those mechanisms.
(The issue is not whether the EU will assume that the UK has declined to third world standards. The issue is whether the EU is required to assume that it hasn’t.)
And (B) as already pointed out, WTO obligations. If the EU enters into a formal agreement with the UK whereby each side recognises and accepts the other’s regulatory standards as equivalent, fine, there is no problem. But, in a no-deal Brexit, as of Brexit day, no such agreement exits, the UK having withdrawn from one precisely because it didn’t want to be in it, and having declined to enter into the replacement agreement offered by the EU because it didn’t want to be in that either. Under WTO rules, in the absence of such an agreement, the most favoured nation rule applies; if the EU extends this treatment to the UK without such an agreement, it must extend the same treatment to every other country without such an agreement. And it’s not going to want to do that.
And of course the same goes for tariffs. If the UK and the EU don’t have a free trade agreement providing for zero tariffs, the EU can’t admit UK goods without levying and collecting tariffs unless it is willing to do the same for every other country in the world with which it lacks a free trade agreement. And, no shit, but it’s not going to be keen on that either.
(And, FWIW, the same applies to the US. If the US has no equivalence agreement with the UK and no free trade agreement with the UK but nevertheless admits UK goods without regulation or tariffs then, yeah, it is committed to doing the same for Nicaragua.)
Because of what UDS said in post #617:
So, in the absence of an accord or treaty between the U.K. and the EU that can be applied post—Brexit, if trade is going to revert to WTO trade rules by default due to a “no-deal” Brexit, the U.K. and the EU are going to have to go back to customs inspections and everything else. Unless they both decide to break the WTO rules they agreed to abide to when they signed on to them, of course. In which case God alone knows what would happen.
I’m open to correction here, but the UK might not be in breach of WTO obligations in not imposing the full range of checks and tariffs on imports from the EU that they impose on imports from other third countries. While the most favoured nation rule would normally require this, I think there are exceptions, or states can grant themselves exceptions, at least on a temporary basis, to avert a grave national crisis, that kind of thing. There’s nothing explicit in the rules that says this has to be a crisis that you could have avoided. So even though the crisis of a no-deal brexit would in fact be the outcome of choices freely made by the UK, a crisis is a crisis, and they could colourably argue that the temporary emergency exception was available to them.
But, even it if were minded to, I don’t think the EU could avail of such an exception, because a no-deal Brexit doesn’t present anything like the same crisis for the EU that it does for the UK.
Wow… just wow! :dubious:
Would you say that the USA is a first world country? Yet standards for food and many other products are very much lower in the USA than in the EU.
Chlorine-washed chickens, hormones in meat, dangerous pesticides on fruit and vegetables, GMO ingredients, all kinds of chemical additives… the list goes on and on. Toxic chemicals in household products, dubious and unproven pharmaceuticals, etc. etc.
Food quality and safety is far higher in the EU, and so is health and safety in general.
Most of the time, lower quality = higher corporate profits. This is the primary reason people like the ERG want Brexit. Being outside EU regulations would mean that corporations can import and export lower quality products, and make more profits.
Well, part of it has to do with the fact that part of the reason for leaving was that the UK had no interest in upholding those strenuous regulations from Brussels. So…
Look, it’s really simple. When you leave a trade union, you do not get to keep all the benefits you got as part of that trade union. Those benefits must be renegotiated, and those negotiations are quite difficult. They’re also very different, as you’re now a foreign power instead of a member state. The EU has a responsibility to get the best deal out of this for its member states. It has absolutely no responsibility towards the UK. This isn’t “vindictive”, it’s simply how trade works.
Someone upthread posted a link to “the nine lessons of brexit”, a lecture by Britain’s former ambassador to the EU. It’s long, but worth reading, especially given that you’re coming into this discussion and rehashing points long since debunked.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/blogs.spectator.co.uk/2018/12/the-nine-lessons-of-brexit/amp/
If that’s too long for you, the Guardian has the cliffs notes version: Ivan Rogers’ Brexit bombshell, digested | Martha Gill | The Guardian
So from reading the last page or two of this thread, it looks like the drug shortages and food rationing which I mentioned before are realistic concerns.
So now, I ask British posters: **why isn’t this a Huuuuge issue in the media? **
The Daily Mail and other sleazy newspapers still exist, don’t they? They should be screaming with headlines about the coming disaster.
And the Times and the respectable press should surely be covering it detail,too. Like the examples above about the lack of warehouse spaces, and the government buying refrigerators for insulin, etc. But do they give it front-page headline?
This is scary stuff! But it’s not just fantasy, there is a reasonable chance that it could happen soon.
Yet life goes on as normal, and nobody seems too concerned.
The Brits are famous for their stiff upper lip, and yeah, back in the days of the blitz they were heroes.
But this is a different era, and people in all western nations are much less willing to suffer.
What’s the feeling on the street?
Does the subject arise, say, in conversations at work?
How do you think the average man on the street will react when the shelves of the high street shops are half empty?
I’ll let others address your other points (it’s a little early for the level of vitriol I have for our mass media) but this point is what worries me most. If/when this all goes tits-up, where does the anger get directed? I fear the worst.
The Daily Mail and the Express are screaming in their headlines - unfortunately, it’s all “Don’t Steal Our Brexit!” any news about the economic reality of a no deal is dismissed as “Project Fear”.
A no-deal Brexit is only one possible outcome. It’s not inevitable.
It looks like it is becoming more and more possible, though.
At first it was unthinkable. Now the British government is preparing for it and getting ready to deploy 3500 soldiers in case of trouble come the end of March.
Yes, it is one of the possibilities… but each passing day it seems to become more and more the most likely one.
And yet… many food standards in the UK currently exceed EU standards (for example, in the humane rearing of animals). There’s no reason to believe we’ll be throwing out all our standards just because the EU isn’t there to tell us so.
We’ll also still want to trade with the EU, which means meeting their food standards.
Let’s not get carried away people - I’m the biggest remainer on the bloc, but leaving the EU doesn’t mean we’re descending into anarchy.
The Daily Mail did this thing on Climate change where it dishonestly hyped up a study predicting a new ice age, then a year later ran a headline attacking “scientists” for the faulty conclusion they had fabricated a year earlier. I would not be surprised if this is a similarly dishonest gambit - play up that hard brexit is no big deal, then when they’re wrong turn around, deny they ever did so, and blame someone else. In other words:
Probably towards May, with a demand for a more conservative (read: completely insane right-winger) PM.
Well, yeah. Which means they’ll need to check our produce thus gumming up the ports but more importantly b) means that there really won’t be much point to Brexit. We’ll still be following EU regs because they’re our largest, nearest trading partner and we have to. If we go through all this just to end up mirroring EU regs on food, data security, flight certification, fuel efficiency etc etc but with added bureaucracy then boy will we look foolish.
Not anarchy, but unnecessary disruption. Especially if it’s No Deal.
By way of illustration: it snowed quite a lot in February last year. I live in a small town 3 minutes from the motorway. After 5 days of snow, there was no bread in either supermarket. This is because supermarkets themselves don’t stock much food - they get regular deliveries. If those deliveries are interrupted for whatever reason, there isn’t a backup plan. All that happens is that the available food gets sold, and there’s none until the lorries start coming through again. If we get the kind of delays predicted for No Deal - the government has seen fit to appoint a minister for food supply, and retailers aren’t investing in extra warehouse space because they’ve got money to burn - we’re not likely to run out of food entirely, but there will be enough gaps on the shelves to prompt hoarding, which is the kind of thing that can escalate quickly. (Remember the petrol haulier strike and attendant panic buying? It wasn’t really panic - it was a rational response to a predicted shortage. But when everyone makes the same rational response, you’ve suddenly got hour long queues at every outlet).
From this page I see that in 2016 Members of Parliament, including Theresa May, favored Remain by more than a 3 to 1 margin over Leave. Yet now they insist on Leaving? 
If these M.P.'s were Directors of a for-profit corporation they would certainly be moved to find some way out of such a predicament. They might order a 2nd referendum, or just beg Europe to let them Remain despite any referendum.
Sure, some M.P.s might lose a bid for re-election if they vote to Remain, but what about the spirit that once made Britain the most powerful nation on the globe? Almost 100,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers gave their lives at the Battle of the Somme in service to their country, but these M.P.'s won’t even give up their sinecures to save their Island? Shame!
Yes, the other major Anglophonic power also made a big blunder in 2016. We have to wait until 2020 to reverse our blunder, but the U.K. could solve its problem right now with the stroke of a pen.
But in negotiating trade deals with other countries we might well find them telling us to accept their lower standard product as the price of the deal.
So not even U.S. standards are good enough for the EU? No wonder the UK wants to leave. Who would want to live under such a bureaucratic state, making regulations for the sake of having regulations.
Are you somehow still laboring under the delusion that the USA is #1 in all things, or where does this come from? Yeah, US standards are not as stringent as EU standards. I don’t think all of the differences reflect well on the EU, but some, like a ban on antibiotics in meat production, are kind of a no-brainer, and it’s disturbing that the US hasn’t adopted them. Others are phenomenally popular in the USA and are not implemented due to lobby pressure (GMO labeling, for example - I oppose it personally, but if the US were more democratic, we’d have it already). This conception of “regulations for the sake of having regulations” is really bizarre to me.
Did you read that speech I sent you, by the way? Like I said, you seem to have some pretty fundamental misconceptions about Brexit and that might help clear some of them up. 
FYI, here is the transcript of a Planet Money report on why auto safety standards are different in Europe versus the US. The car manufacturers would be very happy if the standards were the same, as it would make it cheaper to produce the same car for both markets. But there are various reasons they differ and it’s not just one place “making regulations for the sake of having regulations.” For one thing, in Europe, the assumption is that car drivers are wearing their seatbelts, so cars there have smaller airbags than in the US, where the airbags are designed for an unbelted driver.
First, I know very little about food quality standards. But I have confidence in first world nations that they have sufficient standards to be good enough for me. I would not anywhere in the U.S., the UK, or Canada, (just as examples) that the food I am eating will kill me because of a lack of standards enacted by the country.
For an organization like the EU, that should be good enough. Maybe one country allows this or does not allow that, but the EU is not trying to be a nation. As I understand it, it its meant to be a loose confederation of similarly situated countries to act as a free trade zone. So be a loose confederation; don’t tell a farmer in the UK what pesticides he can put on his tomato plants.
If your group is so restrictive that the United States would not qualify to be a member, then you are too restrictive. And I’m not saying USA #1!!! I am saying that it is an example of arrogance to have standards THAT high and require them on your member states.
And then it gets into things like the death penalty and prohibits member states from having that. I certainly do not want to debate the death penalty, but that is an internal matter in each country. The United States is not hampered in free trade or movement of people between states because some have the death penalty and some do not.
It is overbearing and has caused one of its largest members to leave and there was no need for it to get to that point. If the EU would have stayed true to its original goal and not suffered from bureaucratic bloat, it would have been fine.