Brexiters made their bed. People who didn’t support it have every right to complain. I’m not saying that’s the case here, but there have been threads here in the past where someone who just wanted to vent about things that were happening to them that they didn’t want and couldn’t change got pooh-poohed with “of course everything won’t be just as easy, what did you expect?”
Quite - the sort of ‘lowest common denominator’ legislation that is the hallmark of the EU, which seems to be an inevitable artifact of the way it operates. I think we (the world I mean, not the UK specifically) can do better than this.
It’s exactly the same rule when I’ve flown to the US or to Australia. It’s also the same rule when I’ve flown back to Canada from the EU, Australia and the US.
Seems to be a very common denominator, not just the EU.
Trying to respond a bit to everyone without tedious multi-quoting.
Yes, I totally sympathize with the Remainers. Were I a UK voter I would surely have voted Remain. And would be mightily pissed about the whole situation from beginning to now and into the indefinite future.
At least we in the US have some hope of reversing our insanity of the last 4 years. I think the UK has truly painted itself into an inescapable corner vis a vis the EU. That was … unwise.
I get that for the average holiday-maker this whole thing has been a bit of a surprise because the UK government, for whatever combo of reasons fair and foul, has done a shitty job of explaining what’s coming to the citizenry. FWIW, I suspect the EU governments have been similarly tardy / evasive. Albeit for different reasons.
Anyone who manages a transport company has been aware that hard border controls, or something very close to it, will be coming to the UK/EU border crossings. And darn sure should have been telling their workers what to expect. Or at least what the worst case outcome would look like.
My lack of sympathy is directed at a professional international truck driver who was (or whose employer was) that oblivious.
As to why a ham sandwich, almost certainly zero of it has to do with importing unapproved foodstuffs for sale into the EU ham sandwich market. Any unpackaged or fresh foodstuff is a food source for insects, parasites, fungus, etc. And therefore possibly a carrier of those biohazards. None of which anyone wants crossing their borders.
How aggressively any specific country enforces any specific rule at any specific checkpoint on any specific day against any specific traveler from any specific country is highly variable. Zero tolerance everywhere all the time is logistically impractical, just as is 100% enforcement of all traffic laws everywhere. The authorities try to enforce enough to instill enough deterrence in the majority of the folks passing through.
You seem to want to use this as an example of the mindless EU bureaucracy that caused Brexit in the first place, but you keep downplaying the fact that this is not unique to the EU.
Are EU drivers allowed to bring their lunch into the UK?
Can I fly into London from the US with a pack of bacon in my suitcase? What about Paris to London?
Can you fly to the US with a ham sandwich?
Does it matter if the sandwich also has tomato (seed-bearing fruit)? What about lettuce?
There’s a reason this stuff is complicated.
It’s the way EVERYONE operates. Stop pretending the EU is some sort of uniquely evil hydra of rules and regs.
Yes, but their complaints should be aimed at Her Majesty’s Government - not the EU.
Can you support that assertion please?
Or, is that, as others are telling you, this is a standard rule crossing international boundaries because of the concerns about bio-risks from fresh food, as LSLGuy points out?
In other words, are you saying that this rule is unique to the withdrawal agreement between the UK and the EU, but that if I fly to Paris from Canada I can bring in ham sandwiches?
And if I fly from Canada to London, can I bring in ham sandwiches?
Thank you - that is indeed a good reason that I had overlooked. I suppose then the cognitive dissonance arises in this case due to the abrupt change from it’s OK one day, not OK the next, with no change in the underlying risk. Perhaps this was a part of the UK’s erstwhile membership of the EU that other member states would rather not have accepted, but did so in order to achieve the wider trading agreements necessary. Anyway, I now see the potential value in the restriction that I had missed before.
Yes fair enough, see above. To be clear, I was not arguing that this particular example is caused by EU bureaucracy (as I was previously aware similar restrictions apply all over the world), rather that coincidentally, it could be seen as an illustration of how the EU operates. But clearly I over-reached a bit, apologies for that.
I didn’t claim the EU was unique in this regard, though. As someone said upthread, we are quite capable of generating our own pointless bureaucracy in the UK. Brexit has possibly removed a layer of future EU bureaucracy, at the cost of short-term pain (considerable in some cases), and quite possibly medium- and long-term detriment also. My hope is that all of these will be considerably less than some people envisage.
It wasn’t intended as an assertion - you have (I assume unintentionally) taken the part you quoted out of context, which was a sentence starting “It wouldn’t surprise me if…”. In other words, I was applying my actual knowledge of how certain EU rulings have developed to a situation in which I had no knowledge. Thank you (and everyone else) for putting me straight on this point. Again, I think the question should not be “Why can’t you take a ham sandwich from the UK to the Netherlands today?” but “Why were you allowed to do this 2 weeks ago?”. And I think the answer is likely to be, as I mentioned above, that this was simply a part of EU membership that came with a whole bunch of other benefits, at a pretty small cost (the risk of transmitting disease/parasites from one landmass to another).
so, pure speculation on your part, used to support your argument.
Yes - rhetoric, if you will. Which has now been thoroughly debunked, so the specific case is unfounded and I have withdrawn it. The general point that this is how EU legislation often comes to be still stands, though. I don’t think it was a wildly unrealistic thing to posit, it just happened to be wrong for other reasons.
Thanks for the response. It’s really nice to see someone acknowledge additional information and incorporate it into their worldview. Something we could all use more of these days, especially here in the US.
Because two weeks ago, to bring ham or lettuce or tomato into the UK, you had to follow EU rules so heading to the Continent, the EU could be sure that the item in question had gone through an EU-approved border control. Today, the EU can’t say for sure whether or not the UK is properly enforcing EU border controls, so the line of control shifted to between the UK and the EU.
Now, the UK also has the odd situation that part of that border is actually internal (between NI and the rest), but that’s an historical oddity due to the Good Friday agreement.
Because up to December 31, the UK operated under exactly the same rules for food safety and production as the rest of the EU.
On January 1, the UK no longer was required to do so, as an assertion of UK sovereignty. Since there is no longer any guarantee that the UK meets EU food safety rules, the EU now applies the same entry requirements as any other country that is not part of the EU. Probably no immediate change in risk, but there now is the likelihood of divergence of standards, and there has to be a definite start date to recognise that point.
If the EU gave some sort of “nudge, nudge” to British food products, but not to food products from other countries outside the EU, then it’s opening itself up to a potential WTO complaint.
You’re in, or you’re out. If you’re out, you don’t get the benefits of a common market and free entry of goods.
Britain has chosen to be out.
Border controls are a part of the Brexit position - both ways and I see no issue with that at all.
If I wish to go to the US I would have to meet all sorts of conditions, the reverse is also true. Even crimes that would be classed as pretty minor will exclude entry to the US, so get caught with a joint or two and get a police caution and you’ve a good chance of not being allowed - and quite rightly too, their rules their decision.
Now the EU can decline UK citizens but it will not be done on a whim, there will be reasons that they have decided to implement - so now a UK drug dealer can be refused entry or any number of other concerns, same goes the other way. Does anyone think this is a bad thing?
We can choose to implement criminal record checks - so maybe that scumbag who is on trial this very day for rape and murder of a student might not have been allowed in, criminals generally escalate their offences over time and this particular one will almost certainly have a record in his own EU nation - and he is just one of many I have come across over the years working in prisons.
Similarly the EU will have more checks and deny entry more often to our criminals.
Denying entry from the EU, although it was technicly possible and although there are agreements and terms - it is largely not practicable possible. The hurdles are considerable, the onus is absolutely on the recieving nation to make the proof and the appeals process for those few that do get stopped makes the whole thing a fruitless exercise.
I used to have a colleague working in the MoJ safeguarding arm of the Multi Agency Public Protection Arrangements committee - at a reasonably high enough level. Part of his remit was to deal with absconded parents with children but would get involved with other criminal MAPPA issues. Turns out that not only it is difficult and onerous to prevent entry from EU criminals, deportation of EU criminals who have committed offences in the UK is not as straightforward as you’d expect either.
Now we have a true border, we can set our rules and enforce them, and the EU can do so accordingly, and perhaps in the future agreements can be achieved.
Another point is that illegals now have a hard border to cross - crossing over the channel from France is now legally a very different thing - we all know the EU rules are supposed to offer shelter and case review at the first point of entry to the EU where they are supposed to register, and yet we find in thousands of cases this has not taken place - we have various anecdotes which are likely exgerrated, however the fact is that we can now return them right back from where they last emanated from the EU without the ethical, moral and legalistic dodging that had previously been the dogged laissez faire attitude of EU border officials who just saw this as an issue to be moved from their jurisdiction to anywhere else.
As for rights of residency, well that of course is to be expected, we have agreements on existing workers rights and rights to study, its to be expected that these will change for new cases. So what? Non Domicile Brits have a choice to make if they are not working - same applies the other way too.
All you are moaning about are the normal international relationships in relation to movement of people - if you want to travel, you follow the rules, it isn’t a novel concept.
If you wish to complain about lack of preparedness, you’ll find no argument from me - we are badly prepared and that lack of preparation have been over a decade in the making through the cuts to public services and the failure to recruit and train enough staff - thats not a failure of Brexit, that is a failure of governance.
That laissez-faire attitude you’re taking about, is that from the Continent towards Britain or do you mean in dealing with refugees according to the Dublin agreement?
AFAIK for at least the last six years a huge amount if money and resources has been invested in Frontex. The camp of Sangatte has been dismantled. The fact that we have a refugee crisis on our hands is not the same as laissez-faire. I think the Dublin agreement is highly immmoral because it puts the bulk of the burden on Italy, Greece and Malta with the rest of the EU looking the other way. Especially since there’s no hope of redistributing the burden more fairly anytime soon, because of opposition from Poland and Hungary. But I don’t think the problem in the UK is ANYWHERE NEAR as big as for example in Malta or in Lesbos.
I accept all that, but bringing a packed lunch for your own consumption is not ‘importing goods’ - that’s why I was initially suggesting that rules about ‘trade’ should not apply here. I think LSLGuy nailed it in that this is more about preventing transmission of undesirable organisms from one landmass to another - and the oddity is more that this was allowed before, rather than this is not allowed now. For example, I assume that Australia and New Zealand have extensive trade agreements, but you are still not allowed to bring a ham sandwich from one to the other with impunity (though again I am open to correction from someone with actual knowledge on this vital matter 
).
My parents went to Hawaii and my father tried to bring back some bananas but was told at the security check that he could not. (So he sat down right there and ate all of them.) And that trying to import produce from one US state to another.
Yes it is.
I was told to discard a plastic bag of cucumber slices when flying into the US. Because it isn’t allowed to import food from abroad.
Of course, this will now be a lot harder to do now that the UK is no longer part of Europol, Eurojust, the European Arrest Warrant and real-time sensitive data-sharing agreements such as the Schengen Information System (SIS2).
I suppose we’ll eventually agree some sort of arrangement to replace what we’ve lost. Eventually.
What is the point of having an agreement to check records as part of a trade/legislative bloc that makes the usage of the information from it pointless.
Finding out someone has a criminal record for rape is of limited use if we cannot prevent the individual from crossing our borders. (with the caveat that in theory we can because the EU rules claim to allow this, but in practice makes it so difficult as to be impracticable)
Meanwhile the US, which is not party to that agreement can still demand and obtain records and deny entry on that basis - that must obviously have been done under some sort of agreement - so care to explain why we cannot have such an arrangement?
If only we could teach those pesky parasites and microorganisms to know the difference between a personal packed lunch and goods imported for sale, your proposal to exempt packed lunches from import regulations would be perfectly reasonable.
Per the guardian over 6,000 people were denied entry to Britain between 2010 and 2016. That does not seem to me to be “so difficult as to be impracticable”.