So, I’m drinking a Boddington’s Pub Ale. Not bad. But the can brags, “Imported from Britain”. Why? I’ve see things labeled “Made in England”, “Made in The UK”, even , “Great Britain”.
Is their use of “Britain” some sorta political statement?
I know it’s not the case with Boddingtons, but I wonder if “imported from Britain” could mean “Made in the People’s Republic of Shitbeeristan then shipped in to Britain and exported from there”? Or would it have to be made in the exporting country? Quite a lot of products are made in one country and packaged in another, after being shipped in bulk.
I was not happy when my know-it-all (yet still wrong almost all the time) cousin informed me that Bass Ale was now being brewed in the USA, but for once in his life, he was 100% correct…
It’s still priced at nearly $16 per six pack here in the good ol’ People’s Republic Of Zion…
I did say I know it’s not the case with Boddingtons. I haven’t had Boddies for ages, now I come to think of it. It used to be my beer of choice as a teenager.
There’s no such discrete entity as “Britain” per se; it should be taken as shorthand for** Great Britain** or The British Isles, neither of which are the same as England.
Nitpick: “Britain” is not used to refer to the British Isles (a term that has slightly fallen out of favour itself), since the British Isles includes the country of Ireland (as well as other territory that is not technically part of the UK). “Britain” is just another term for the UK (even though the UK includes some territory that is not actually on the island of Great Britain, as others have mentioned). “Great Britain” is also very often used to refer to the country as a whole and not just the island of that name.
In other words, all these would mean essentially the same thing:
Imported from Britain
Imported from Great Britain
Imported from the UK
Indeed the ISO 3166 country code for the UK is, rather confusingly, GB, not UK (although the top-level internet domain is .uk). This leads to the rather odd situation that cars in Northern Ireland are identified abroad by “GB” stickers (or on the side of the plate itself) even though they’re not from “Great Britain” itself.
You’re fooling yourself. We’re living in a dictatorship, a self-perpetuating autocracy in which the working classes are exploited by an establishment hanging onto outdated imperialist dogma, which perpetuates the social and economic differences in our society.
No, nothing political, just a shorthand reference for the United Kingdom Of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. No different from calling the US ‘America’. Politicians use the word ‘Britain’ all the time, and they’re more politically correct than anyone else. Handy for campaignslogans.