I’m not questioning the need for agricultural inspections at border posts. I’m questioning why Agriculture as a ministry apparently has top-level responsibility for the whole shebang in NI when HMRC is a thing that exists.
Because customs agencies don’t often do enforcement on internal borders and agricultural agencies do? I’ve lost track of which borders do what where in that region, so I don’t know.
There is a big shortage of veterinary surgeons in the UK.
Despite warnings from the professional associations the government did little to prepare for the massive increase in workload as a result of Brexit.
Usually the UK poaches the professionals it needs from other countries. Now that there is no free mobility of labour that comes with EU membership, applicants have to apply for a UK work visa and meet the costs.
Curiously enough, inspection work at ports is probably not the kind of work that professional vetenarians dream about after all their years of study.
There were warnings that there would be bottlenecks at the ports because of this:
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5801/cmselect/cmenvfru/231/23111.htm#_idTextAnchor026
The UK economy is about to start recovering after a lockdown and this will expose many more skill shortages because the barriers that have been introduced to hiring EU nationals at all levels.
The new UK immigration policy is all about attracting the ‘brightest and the best’ to the UK. Only the elite need apply.
There is a big disconnect between that and the jobs that need to be done and this will become very evident once the economy revives.
Immigration was one of the key issues during the Brexit years. It is for the UK government to now show how their new policy will work to attract the skills the UK needs to fill the gaps in the labour market.
What could possibly go wrong?
But my point is that it’s no longer really an internal border. That there’s customs and excise things attached now, that aren’t really the ambit of cheese inspectors.
My understanding is that people can move freely between NI and the rest of the UK, but agricultural products can’t.
It’s a messy and illogical situation.
I was more thinking of all the other commercial traffic besides agricultural produce - as I understand it, there are no border posts between NI and the Republic, so anything entering NI is effectively entering the EU, and vice versa. So all the non-agricultural stuff that goes from the rest of the UK to NI needs to be checked by customs, doesn’t it? And ditto stuff coming into the UK via that route.
Agriculture isn’t in charge of checking trucks in Dover, are they?
To clarify, there is freedom of movement between GB/NI/RoI under the Common Travel Area agreement (Note ‘agreement’ rather than any binding legislation). This agreement/arrangement was in place before 1973 when both countries joined the EEC and is back in place now the UK has left - more to the point, it never went away, it just wasn’t needed.
Regardless of any historical animosity, there is a lot of cooperation between the UK & RoI in social matters. Citizens of either can work, access Healthcare, Education, Social security/housing benefits and other public services, and vote on the same terms/rules/conditions as ‘the natives’.
The Republic of Ireland and the UK opted out of the Schengen Agreement that defines the EU Common Travel Area where there are minimal checks at the border.
But that is people. Trade in goods and services is a different matter.
Governments are very cautious about agriculture and livestock movements because of the history of epidemics amongst livestock and plant diseases and pests.
For those inspections you need the appropriate skilled professionals in the right numbers and in the right places.
This not insignificant challenge seemed to escape the attention of the UK Brexit negotiators. I believe the that at moment the UK does not inspect the goods coming into the UK. But the reverse is not true when exporting to the EU. This has caused a lot of problems for the UK food exporters. The farmers, fishermen and many food exporters have seen their businesses crippled by delays as they face the challenge of producing the extensive documentation required by the EU. Some of those documents require a signature that the shipment has been inspected by a suitably qualified professional.
When the destination is Northern Ireland for goods coming from the UK, it gets complicated. On the Northern Ireland side, the UK authorities are obliged to follow EU import inspection procedures. I presume that for exports from the Northern Ireland to the UK, the checks can be minimal.
If the UK does get around to inspecting everything that comes into the UK from EU I expect there will be even more delays at the ports.
It is quite difficult to see what advantage there is to the UK in any of this. If anything it simply stirs up old resentments and conflicts, and in Northern Ireland, that is a serious issue.
Again, just to be clear, there is a separate agreement called the ‘Common Travel Area’ between the UK & RoI. See the link in my other post, if interested. It existed before the 2 countries joined the EEC/EU (and from before the the original Treaty of Rome which created the EEC in the first place).
Schengen is something completely separate even if the general principal as regards the free movement of people is concerned. And I appreciate this thread is about the UK & Brexit - so I’ll stop now.
(bolding mine)
You know, I think EU should be useful as some kind of cognitive Rorschach test. “What do you see when you look at the EU?” 
An eastern European will see a way of increasing prosperity and decreasing corruption, a brexiter will see a hegemonic organization bent on exploiting the UK, you’re seeing a mean, lean trade negotiation machine…
And my question is, what made you think that? Which part of EU’s history and which specific treaties and regulations? Because I don’t see it. Sure, EU is arguably good at making trade deals (of a certain type - namely win-win), but a nimble and swift negotiator? Not at all, simply because it doesn’t have the legal authority to be so.
Can you think of a single major crisis (military, diplomatic, economic) over the last 70 years when EU reacted swiftly? Just from the top of my head:
- Breaking up of Yugoslavia, on the doorsteps of EU - without US intervention that would have been even more horrific than it was
- Speaking of trade deals: after negotiation one with Canada (which took 5 years), it almost got scuttled by a Belgian province.
- Italy and Greece had to cope for more than one year with an increasing influx of immigrants and refugees from Syria and Libya before EU could convince the other EU countries to take some action. Until that point almost all EU countries were happy to hide behind the Dublin agreement (which was not negotiated with such massive influx of refugees in mind) and let Italy and Greece figure it out for themselves.
- Speaking of refugees, Germany took an unilateral decision to accept 1 million of them…thus forcing other countries to open their borders to let the refugees pass through. Could EU do something about that? I don’t think so, immigration and border policing are national prerogatives.
- Going back to trade: Germany it’s actually increasing it’s dependency on Russian gas with the Nordstream2 pipeline which is currently under construction. Most of the other EU countries don’t like it, but there’s nothing EU can do about it.
- EU countries agreed (after disputed negotiations) on a covid economic recovery plan of 800 billion euro (about half of US’s, by the way). For more than half a year it was unclear if this plan will actually go forward, because it might have been against German law (the German Constitutional Court gave it the green light only last week).
- Hungary is heading (or maybe it is already) to some sort of autocratic rule, very likely some fundamental freedoms are already at risk there. What can EU do about it? Not much according to the existing treaties, as long as Poland blocks any attempt of sanctioning Hungary.
So when you’re talking about disorganization in America, in contrast to the presumably organized EU, I’m getting confused. US government has departments and agencies with the legal and financial means to deal with the issues such the ones I mentioned above, even when the government is lead by a brain dead moron who’s only “skill” is spewing verbal diarrhea.
Can you point to similar EU organizations that can act in a similar manner, without risking being blocked by national bodies? Could a single US state veto Biden’s 1.9 billion$ plan?
I’m afraid the EU is more the product of natural selection than of intelligent design. Attempts to make it work in a more streamlined manner didn’t work; remember the EU constitution, reject by the French and the Dutch?
Making EU a more efficient organization it’s a slow process that goes forward mostly in times of crisis. Despite EU having no formal responsibilities and authority concerning healthcare at the beginning of the pandemic, not getting involved was not an option. Remember when Trump let individual states bid for IC ventilators at the start of the epidemic, and the clusterfuck that ensued, with prices skyrocketing as states bid against each other and against the federal government? I think it would have been 10 times worse if EU countries would have played the “everyone for himself” game.
EU is not good at solving crises. The EU deals with crises by avoiding them, by making sure (usually through long and careful negotiations) that all involved parties have something to lose in the event of a crisis, or rather something to win by not triggering a crisis. Which doesn’t work with the likes of Putin and Erdogan, hence the recent string of EU foreign policy failures when dealing with Russia and Turkey.
And about EU not catching up, vaccination wise, with UK and US, what’s the problem with that? UK and US did exceptionally well, good for them. Does it mean that EU failed? I don’t think so. Right now, besides UK and US, the only countries that administered more vaccines per capita than EU are Israel, Chile, Uruguay, Hungary and Serbia, and there are serious doubts about the efficiency of Chile’s, Hungary’s and Serbia’s vaccination campaigns (mostly reliant on Russian and Chinese vaccines - not sure what the situation in Uruguay is like).
But even assuming EU would have been good at making quick trade deals in time of crisis, I would argue that this whole vaccine procurement process was NOT a trade deal, hence not something within the supposed EU core competencies.
Why do I think that? Well, let’s have a look at the US, land of the invisible hand of the market, free trade, minimal government intervention and profit maximization. American companies developed a highly effective vaccine, and they had the capacity to produce it in big quantities. They had a virtual monopoly on a product that the whole world (literally) wanted. A capitalist’s wet dream, right? An excellent occasion to trade, increase company’s value on the stock market and please shareholders. It’s not like there were not rich customers out there, willing to pay for the privilege: Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Switzerland (by the way, how are these countries doing, vaccination-wise, compared to the EU? Not so well, I’d say).
Yet none of this happened. And why? Because the US government treated the vaccines as a strategic resource, not as a commodity. There was no market for anyone wishing to buy US vaccines, or even the components needed to make the vaccines.
Saying the procuring vaccines was “just trade” is a little bit like saying buying fighter jets or attack submarines is “just trade”. If China would offer to buy F-22 fighter jets at 5 times the price tag, I’m quite sure that deal won’t fly.
Even so, when it comes to the vaccine procurement, the biggest EU failure is AstraZeneca. The other vaccine manufacturers actually delivered according to the agreed schedule, or even above what was initially agreed (IIRC, Pfizer provided 50 million extra doses for the 2nd quarter of this year).
The irony is that in fact EU countries actually developed an efficient vaccine: AstraZeneca is the invention of a British-Swedish company, and it is manufactured in UK, the Netherlands and Belgium. If the pandemic would have happened in 2016, AstraZeneca would have been an EU product. 
Sometimes I’m wondering: how would US’ vaccination program have fared if California would have seceded following Trump’s election? 
Could the pre-epidemic EU invested more in virology, even without the legal means to create and implement healthcare policies? Probably it could have, at least indirectly (and actually the Oxford lab responsible for AstraZeneca received some EU founding pre-Brexit, IIRC). But I’m pretty sure that taking direct measures, like telling the French “monsieurs, you should specialize in these particular medical fields, and share your knowledge in these other fields with the Dutch/Spanish/Germans” would have been promptly rejected. Heck, the French still insist on the EU parliament traveling monthly to Strasbourg just because, and apparently the rest of the EU cannot veto them. So much for EU being able to take quick, sensible, common-sense decisions.
Looks like EU nationals are now being subject to the ‘hostile environment’ towards anyone who transgresses UK immigration rules.
Woebetide anyone from the EU who comes to the UK for a job interview.
This aggressive policy has been in place for years and was rigourously applied to non-EU nationals. It was considered a vote winner. Skills gaps in the job market were filled by the EU nationals who pretty much came and went as they pleased. But now Brexit is in place, the same aggressive policy is being applied to nationals of the 27 countries of the EU.
There will be howls of anguish if UK nationals are treat the same way in the EU.
As the economy recovers after the Covid lockdown, there will be a high demand for staff in the hospitality business. Normally this is highly dependent on youngsters from EU countries.
I think the UK government is rather hoping that British workers will fill the skills gap.
That would require a cultural change in attitude towards service jobs in hospitality or agricultural labour. There is a huge snobbery about job status in the UK and employers will find it challenging to fill the vacancies.
Government policy reflects this snobbery. It wants only the brightest and best to come to the UK, so has erected a high salary bar to qualify for work permits. There are exceptions for Nobel Prize winners and Oscar winners, of course. But not in all subjects.
UK governments have always been pretty bad at immigration policy and with Brexit they have had to come up with one that matches the countries needs. It shows all the signs of not being thought through very well.
I think the strategy now for the Tories is “hostile environment” being widely used as a tactic to avoid the law they’ve signed up for.
The seeds of this environment seem to have come from the UK welfare system, which had an institutionalised broken paperwork system in areas of the country of high unemployment in the mid 80s onwards. You apply for social security in say Scotland in 1990, and it will be 8 weeks later, you’ll be crying on their doorstep after them losing your paperwork three times and you’ve been eating friends foods for a fortnight. I remember that. I also remember applying in area of high employment (Reading) and happily being paid money I wasn’t actually due.
This seems to have been “successfully” applied to the non-EU immigration system under the tories during their new reign. You might have the right to remain in the UK, but they immigration service will be doing their best to make you not want to stay.
I suspect this has now been taken as a tactic across the multiple areas that the UK government signed up for but doesn’t want to implement. They want free entry into the EU via a shared area, Northern Ireland, but signed up to say they’re enforcing borders. This is a bad faith move, and they hope to leverage the violence of a highly problematic demographic (NI Loyalists) to get it dropped. The fishing issue in Channel Islands is actually breaking the Free Trade Agreement due to putting on additional conditions of the licenses. It’s another attempt to wriggle out of an obligation.
What the UK signed up to, and the EU just ratified was almost a hilariously bad deal for the UK. The EU signed it because it was such a good deal to them. Arguably the UK signed up to it because it didn’t realise it was, but it might have been in bad faith, with alternative measures to hide the serious impacts and bypass and leverage the bits they don’t like. The UK has long since abandoned any reputation for sense on their side, what’s being an incompetent surly rogue state going to change that?
However, it seems as if the EU is using the rest of the agreements to come to leverage compliance which points back to the incompetent end or that they don’t care about any real downside at all. The financial agreement which is worth a huge multiple of whatever the fishing fleet brings is now in hiatus on the EU side. I’m sure the UK will be holding back more flag waving disasters for future. Their voters seem keen on that and don’t seem to care that the country is shutting down a whole lot of industry to prove some point to a number of befuddled false patriots. It’s working for them.