I know. Terrible, isn’t it?
I’m serious, not gloating. I’m worried.
I’m a US airline pilot. I routinely fly internationally. I know not to bring a ham sandwich from one country to another; that really pisses off the authorities. I also know not to go grocery shopping for fresh food in country X and then go visit country Y. Even, or especially, if either of those is my home country.
I carry some emergency rations in my suitcase, such as protein bars and beef jerky. All in their factory sealed airtight, insect-proof packages. Some of those protein bars have been declared to some countries’ customs agencies 40 times before I get a chance to eat them. Every country I visit gets told about my 3 protein bars & 2 packages of jerky. The alternative is potential arrest, fines, & persona non grata, or at least “person of perpetual interest” status.
It’s a shame nobody told those drivers that they are now crossing in international border. OTOH, it takes a particularly blinkered blindness for a UK person not to realize that France, or the Netherlands, is a foreign country. All the funny talking the locals do really ought to be a clue.
Color me unsympathetic.
Just to clarify, when I asked “why?” I meant, “why were you shocked?” Agree it’s going to cause a lot of disturbance.
Can you spare a thought for the 48,1% of UK voters who voted to remain in the EU?
… not to mention the poor ham - it likely came from an EU country to start with.
I mean, sure, but the point is that this has changed literally overnight. A couple of weeks ago, COVID permitting, a person could have driven from the UK to the Netherlands with a picnic hamper full of ham sandwiches and no one would have cared. All those things you know about food and international travel didn’t apply to crossing the Channel and haven’t for the best part of 50 years.
But surely, you say, the government has taken the time to clearly communicate to travelers the impact of the new changes in a way no one could miss or fail to understand?
You know that bit in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where the info about the new bypass was on display in a cellar with no lights and no stairs behind a locked door with a sign on it saying “Beware of the leopard?”. As far as the government’s “This is what Brexit means for you, an ordinary citizen” campaign goes, that would be a step up.
This. It’s more sadness that it’s come to this than shock I guess. Of course for everyone travelling to/from EU this is no surprise, but for those living in it and being accustomed to virtually unrestricted travelling between member states it’s a bit of a cold shower. Just proves how privileged we actually are.
Eta: I’m old enough to remember the Iron Curtain, so i know it’s not a given, just that we seem to be going backwards.
But that’s the point. They’ve been taking funnily all the time before as well, and that didn’t mean anything with regards to food imports.
I think what we see here (and I’m including my own initial reaction in this), is the difference between knowledge as a collection of facts (knowing that Brexit means a hard border), and actually incorporating that knowledge into your own frame of reference, ie knowing that a hard border means actually really going abroad, in the sense that I as a Dutch citizen distinguish between holidaying in France (bring your ID but that’s basically all the preparation you’ll need. You can bring your own groceries and other stuff, such as corkscrews and pocket knives) and holidaying abroad in a bring-your-passport-and-check-your-luggage sense. I think it’s comparable to domestic flight v transatlantic flight in your profession. For England there was always a different monetary unit, so that’s a giveaway, but that’s pretty much it. We used to have to change money into local currency when holidaying pretty much everywhere in Europe, but that’s almost twenty years ago as well.
I suspect the average Brexiteer’s default position is something like: exactly nothing changed between 31/12/20 and 1/1/21 that made transporting a ham sandwich between the UK and the Netherlands (and vice versa) any more or less risky/important for either country - so why is it suddenly an issue? Or to put it another way, what reason is there for a customs official to confiscate said sandwich? To the uninformed observer (i.e. most people), it just looks like exactly the sort of petty bureaucracy that has been one of the main bones of contention with the EU.
I am not exactly taking this position myself - I like to think that this thread, among others, has made me a little better informed - but I do have to wonder what the underlying reasons for such things are. I mean, I get the point that imports and exports obviously can’t be a complete free-for-all (the opposite extreme). I also get that nations may wish to control what goods cross their borders in quite a detailed way. In particular, anything that could result in non-native species establishing themselves, or rules that allow possible workarounds to established trade agreements. And I know this is not an issue specific to the EU - probably all countries have similar restrictions. What I don’t get is why a ham sandwich would fall foul of these rules. But maybe there is a good reason.
Bottom line - of course we need trade agreements to be enforced. I don’t think we need Customs to confiscate ham sandwiches. This particular story is not a good argument against Brexit per se, just as fatuous reports about straight/bendy bananas were not a good argument for it.
It’s not an “anti-Brexit” story. It’s a story illustrating one way in which Brexiters failed to understand the myriad ramifications of leaving the EU. In the grand scheme of things losing one’s ham sandwich is trivial. Other changes are or will be more serious. And for the Brits previously happily residing in other EU countries pre-Brexit (who didn’t get a say in the matter), the ramifications have been quite significant indeed.
Trying taking fruit into Australia (or, IIRC, inter-state in Australia). Every country has its own way of protecting its internal market - that was the point of Brexit, but it follows that the same is equally true of the EU iinternal market. We’ve had two years of transitional status, during which it was clear that the governing legal regimes would change on 1 January: if our government wanted ham sandwiches exempted, it would have negotiated for it as part of the final trade agreement. But it didn’t. So once again we come to the basic point - you can’t be half in and half out, and if you want out, you’re all out.
Coincidentally I’m just reading this really useful blog on how people adapt to Brexit. It’s more aimed at businesses than individuals but still very relevant, especially to Dead Cat’s question about why the rules are being enforced so closely:
All the talk of ‘new’ red tape and regulations betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about what happened on 31 December. These regulations are not new. They are the normal rules of trade. Membership of the EU’s customs union and single market effectively gave us immunity from these rules when we traded within its borders. The reason the EU built a trade wall around its borders is so that trade can move freely within it. Once goods are within the EU, the customs union means that they have already had their tariffs paid and the single market means that they have either been made or imported according to a common set of regulations. Therefore they can be moved around the EU without any further checks.
By triggering Article 50, the UK set itself on a course to rip up that immunity, at which point, the normal rules of trade reappear.
The freedom that exists within the EU exists because the rules are enforced at the border. You can’t have one without the other. And this is, I think, the point the Dutch are making. Out is out. There are a lot of new rules involved in UK-EU travel now. There is a lot of value, to the people whose job it is to enforce these rules, in making that crystal clear. They’ve sent a message - they are serious about enforcing the rules we asked to apply to us. That makes good psychological sense. At the beginning of the new regime, make it clear that the change has happened. Anyone watching this video now knows that if even a ham sandwich won’t get through, it’s not worth ignoring the paperwork or thinking there’ll be some exception just for you, just because. It saves everyone a lot of hassle in the long run if the rules are clear from the get-go.
(Worth reading that blog in full, especially for it’s condemnation of business leaders for not getting their heads round this fast enough.)
Australia is a good example, but my understanding of that is that it is to prevent foreign plants/animals being introduced - a discarded apple core could potentially do this, a ham sandwich, not so much. Bringing in one apple or one ham sandwich is also clearly not infringing in any significant way on a country’s internal market.
I’m not sure - another conclusion people might draw is that they are making the point in a stupid way. There is clearly a vast difference between bringing a packed lunch and a lorryload of pigs and anyone who thinks otherwise is hardly likely to be convinced by this demonstration anyway. It smacks to me of the old adage about if you give someone a small amount of power, they will look to exercise it to the greatest possible degree.
What nonsense!
You resign from the club: you lose all the benefits of membership. Even the right to carry a ham sandwich over the border
Doesn’t matter whether people think there’s a difference or not. What matters is they know not to expect wiggle room, blind eyes being turned, grey areas, fuzziness, varying interpretations or inconsistency no matter what they’re bringing in. For the purposes of rule enforcement, this is an excellent place to have arrived at so quickly. I’m not saying there wasn’t just a little bit of “Here’s that Brexit you said you wanted” mentality behind it, just that as we did want Brexit and now we have it, it’s actually no bad thing to have it made clear so early what we got.
Maybe, in 5 years time, when everyone has all the paperwork filled out perfectly every time, ham sandwiches will cross the border freely. But when we’re starting off a completely novel era of trade and border rules, total clarity on what those rules are and what enforcement of them actually involves has some value. And all it cost was a ham sandwich.
There should have been a grace period on ham sandwiches because come on, the ham in the sandwich was surely slaughtered, smoked, and packaged before Jan 1st, 2021, right? Maybe not a pork chop, though.
There could have been a grace period, if HM Government had negotiated one. But they didn’t. So there isn’t.
To be clear, my main objection is not so much the enforcement of a rule about ham sandwiches, it’s the fact that a rule exists that covers ham sandwiches. It wouldn’t surprise me if this was because, after endless rounds of negotiation on rules for pork import and export, the EU ended up with a law that includes ham sandwiches, for no reason other than people were fed up of the whole process and so a sensible exemption (say, the rules don’t apply to importing cooked pork weighing less than 10kg, which means if a family wants to bring a case of Spam on their holidays they can - or a round of ham sandwiches) was not included in the final draft.
A lot of them, actually. Every lorry driver who stood in line had them confiscated. Hence the sadness. But I totally agree with you; they made their bed etc. It’s just that the people who have thought this all up are not the ones paying the price, and it goes to show how utterly incompetent he current British government is at the moment that they do not seem to have prepared the people actually dealing with the consequences
Exactly. Any time I’ve flown to the UK or France from Canada, those were the ground rules - “You can’t bring in fresh meat, fresh fruit or vege, etc.” The rules haven’t changed.
The British simply decided that they wanted those existing rules to apply to themselves.
The more exceptions you build into the border-crossing rules, the more ambiguity there is, and potentially longer it takes to cross through, because there’s more checking, and more people upset because they thought they were within the rules…
“No fresh meat, fruit, dairy” is a bright-line rule that everyone can understand and easily apply.