The Cost Of Brexit

[Major_Tom]

18 days and I cancelled the order. Enough is enough 

 

 

[sam3k]

On 1/29/2021 at 10:56 PM, Major_Tom said:

18 days and I cancelled the order. Enough is enough 

 

 

 

I too have a parcel stuck with UPS at "Stanford Le Hope". From what I can tell UPS are having a big issue with either Brexit and new customs rules, or possibly they are having (understandable) staffing issues.

 

There seem to be lots of people having similar issues with them at the moment.

 

[bbs]

On 1/2/2021 at 12:35 PM, Dione said:

They give sellers a choice of whether to choose it or not. As long as you manually change your select button in Account Preferences > Postage Preferences from yes to no then they won't choose it for you

I don’t get an option to change Postage Preferences ....?

[MoriartyR]

I was informed by one of the well-known mainland Europe pen retailers that Sailor is currently relocating its European distribution facility from UK to France to overcome issues it is facing.

 

I don’t know if it’s true or not, but my pen is delayed nonetheless.

 

One of the unpleasant surprises of Brexit is that imports to the UK from anywhere in the world - not just from the EU - are disrupted, difficult and costly because the UK customs process was organised according to EU procedures and had to be replaced rapidly. So it does make sense that if Sailor were serving the EU market from the UK they will have had difficulties getting pens in from Japan as well as sending pens out to EU countries.

 

[brokenclay]

Any US people having trouble creating a USPS shipping label to the UK? I've been trying for days to use Click-N-Ship to create a label, and just keep getting a mystery error: "We are sorry but an unexpected error has occurred during the checkout process. Please try again later."

[fpupulin]

Premise: I was not a Brexit supporter.

 

But ... What is happening is not a price of Brexit, but a simple temporary consequence of it, due to the difficulty of implementing the new fiscal and customs measures. We will only know the true price of Brexit, for better or for worse, when these adjustments have been completed.

 

In the meantime, given the uncertainty of the proceedings and the length of the paperwork, since last December I have completely distracted my interest from the English sales pages, and I think this is the most convenient thing to do at the moment.

 

In fact I find it irritating that, for reasons that can only be political, when on Ebay I select to see only offers from the EU because they provide for the free exchange of goods, they also continue to present the pages of English sellers, whose goods are now excluded from this free market and provide for not completely transparent burdens on the buyer. 

[Karmachanic]

On 2/12/2021 at 7:28 PM, MoriartyR said:

One of the unpleasant surprises of Brexit is that imports to the UK from anywhere in the world - not just from the EU - are disrupted, difficult and costly because the UK customs process was organised according to EU procedures and had to be replaced rapidly.

 

 

The Sailor ordered form Japan arrived quickly and without issue. Having paid VAT, Duty and handling charge on arrival, I still realized a £100 saving. No disruption, no problem.

[MoriartyR]

15 minutes ago, fpupulin said:

Premise: I was not a Brexit supporter.

 

But ... What is happening is not a price of Brexit, but a simple temporary consequence of it, due to the difficulty of implementing the new fiscal and customs measures. We will only know the true price of Brexit, for better or for worse, when these adjustments have been completed.

 

Well, temporary or not, it is still part of the cost of Brexit. It’s hard to predict how much of the onerous paperwork the UK will be able to ease over time, or how soon. Also hard to estimate how many businesses and jobs will move out of the UK permanently because they can’t afford to operate this way for long. As far as I am aware the UK government has not yet presented any plan to alleviate these issues.

 

I work in the corporate real estate sector and it is definitely true that UK businesses have been very active in establishing offices in the EU over the last two years. Netherlands has been a major beneficiary, and France and Germany are starting to capitalise more now too.

 

But your point is right that the long term cost is still uncertain and could be better or worse than the economists forecasted. Still, I’m confident that most Brexit voters understood that there would be economic damage and they felt it was an acceptable trade-off for whatever it is that each of them believed the benefits would be.

 

As you say, best to avoid purchasing anything from the UK for now.

It is the first time in history that a nation has imposed economic sanctions on itself.

 

[Jorge]

14 hours ago, MoriartyR said:

Well, temporary or not, it is still part of the cost of Brexit. It’s hard to predict how much of the onerous paperwork the UK will be able to ease over time, or how soon. Also hard to estimate how many businesses and jobs will move out of the UK permanently because they can’t afford to operate this way for long. As far as I am aware the UK government has not yet presented any plan to alleviate these issues.

 

I work in the corporate real estate sector and it is definitely true that UK businesses have been very active in establishing offices in the EU over the last two years. Netherlands has been a major beneficiary, and France and Germany are starting to capitalise more now too.

 

But your point is right that the long term cost is still uncertain and could be better or worse than the economists forecasted. Still, I’m confident that most Brexit voters understood that there would be economic damage and they felt it was an acceptable trade-off for whatever it is that each of them believed the benefits would be.

 

As you say, best to avoid purchasing anything from the UK for now.

It is the first time in history that a nation has imposed economic sanctions on itself.

 

All that economic aspects are of course there, but, please, do not neglect the human and social aspects as well.

My daughter lives and works in the UK, and on top of the travel restrictions due to the Pandemic which prevented her from visiting us on three different occasions throughout this last year, now these trading consequences of Brexit are preventing us from the sending of small packages to each other, which helped minimizing the feeling of distance.

Since early January, the Customs seem to be totally blocked and unoperational at least for this type of small shipments, and apparently there is no expected date of recovery to an acceptable level of operation. 

[Dione]

It's not only Brexit but all parts of the UK have been in full lockdown due to Covid and there have been so many new cases and deaths that staffing levels for essential services are completely disrupted. We're convinced our mail is only being delivered twice per week at the moment. Maybe once Covid is completely sorted out then Brexit may move up the "urgent attention required" list.

[RJS]

The government failed to build the new facilities or hire the thousands of new staff necessary to conduct all the additional work customs are now lumbered with. As usual they chose the 'bury our heads in the sand and hope the problem goes away' approach. The extent to which this is impacting freight is extraordinary. 
 

The only items I've ordered from Europe this year have sailed through unimpeded, including a £100 item that they didn't worry about applying VAT to. But I've heard horror stories from other people, and not just for items ordered from the EU but from anywhere abroad. I've personally had regular UK mail arrive weeks or months late-or not at all (so far) in two cases- the additional strain of Brexit and Covid is too much for a poorly run company like Royal Mail to cope with.

[MoriartyR]

7 hours ago, Jorge said:

All that economic aspects are of course there, but, please, do not neglect the human and social aspects as well.

You’re absolutely right. By far the biggest costs of Brexit for many people (including me) are the non-economic ones. I am sorry that you are having such problems.

 

I’m British, currently living and working in the EU, and my wife of twenty years is German. Aside from having to give up the enormously valuable aspiration of one day retiring somewhere nice - perhaps in Italy - the additional worry for us is that I do not have the automatic right to move back to the UK in future with my wife. And if we did move to the UK and my wife can get a residency visa (which I guess she will, although the rules say she wouldn’t unless I am working and earning a certain income) she would not have any rights to remain if I die, and would not have access to healthcare.

 

Oddly, EU citizens living in the UK have the permanent right to bring their family members to live with them. It is only the British who are deprived of this right. The House of Lords challenged this discriminatory aspect of the legislation but the government refused to make the same allowance for its own citizens.

 

And psychologically it is very difficult when your government is against you and your family. I get pretty angry about this stuff, and I apologise for going off topic.

 

 

[RJS]

So many of us are angry. Angry not just for ourselves but for future generations that have been stitched up. I'm frankly embarrassed to be British, for very many reasons. 
 

Let's not forget we are from a country where it's acceptable to lie in Parliament, but it's forbidden to call a lie a lie in Parliament. Amazing the pro-Brexit crowd were able to tell such complete lies about the supposed benefits, and get away without punishment.

[MoriartyR]

17 minutes ago, RJS said:

So many of us are angry. Angry not just for ourselves but for future generations that have been stitched up. I'm frankly embarrassed to be British, for very many reasons. 
 

Let's not forget we are from a country where it's acceptable to lie in Parliament, but it's forbidden to call a lie a lie in Parliament. Amazing the pro-Brexit crowd were able to tell such complete lies about the supposed benefits, and get away without punishment.

The Right Honourable member has been “economical with the truth”. They can say that.

But of course they should really be throwing some F-bombs to add the proper emphasis.

[Emver]

Much as I enjoy buying fountain pens, the additional costs and complexity of importing or exporting them brought about by Brexit seems like a minor inconvenience compared to the very real loss of liberty which we in the UK have imposed upon ourselves.  We no longer have the freedom to live or work or trade, or even travel freely in 27 neighbouring countries.  How quickly we forget the hard earned lessons of history!

[RJS]

This is what happens when the entirety of the printed national media, bar the Independent, encourage the uneducated masses to vote according to their hatred and xenophobia. 
 

Pathetic opposition parties also didn't help the cause one bit. Labour, for their part, were fearful of alienating their traditional voter base.

 

Having lived for years in Asia I see countries pushing themselves towards the future at an incredible rate, and in the UK I see a country deteriorating, where everyone has to spend their lives striving towards buying a really rubbish tiny house on a tiny piece of land. If more people went further abroad than Ibiza they'd have noticed how we live in the smallest houses in the developed world, and how run down so much of the UK looks.

[Karmachanic]

Spilt milk.

[RJS]

I'm not going to be crying about Brexit, but I'm not going to be living my life in the UK (as I wasn't for many years anyway). 
 

Brits that don't think we get a lousy deal from the government haven't had the benefit of studying Political History and travelling widely.
 

And if anyone doesn't think they're getting screwed when they pay a homebasher £700k for a shoddy new build that costs about £70k to slap together, and isn't even in a city, they're either uninformed or deluded.

[MoriartyR]

With apologies for the further digression, I think an interesting thing is that the UK considers itself to be a relatively wealthy country - 6th in the world by GDP and 2nd in Europe, 26th in the world by mean GDP per capita. This perception never matched what I observe (at least since the 80s), judging by the living standards, stores, homes of ordinary British people compared to other countries. By comparison it always seemed to me that the British were relatively poor and most people by far struggle day-to-day.

I found that if you look instead at median disposable income the UK actually ranks 9th in Europe, or 15th if you adjust for purchasing power (i.e. the cost of living). That puts the UK about on par with the Czech Republic, not Germany or France. For most people the UK is not one of the wealthiest countries in Europe - it is similar to what the British consider to be developing countries. In the UK people don’t earn much compared to the high cost of housing, utilities and other things. Food is pretty cheap in the UK, though, and has become cheaper over the years.

 

Somehow, for most people, there is a complete disconnect between what they experience and the way the government talks about the economic position of the nation. More than this, instead of facing these real, internal issues politicians preferred to try and blame external factors for their maladies, especially the EU. I think this explains some of the public dissatisfaction that contributed to the Brexit decision, as well as Britain’s vulnerability to further economic decline or price increases.

 

[Uncial]

I guess Britain has never really had to deal with the type of destructive isolationist nationalism that so many other parts of Europe have passed through; some with very considerable fall-out, tragedy and murder. Ireland did it to a degree with a resultant war of independence and a brutally ugly civil war, but it's never quite shaken it off - largely due to the politics of Northern Ireland giving the likes of Sinn Fein a kind of shoe-horn in to keeping that type of politics alive. It does leave many Irish with a deep suspicion of that hard line nationalism and perhaps even a fear of it. As an Irish person looking in at the whole Brexit affair I don't think I was able to pinpoint any argument that went beyond a vague idea of sovereignty. We've all heard those arguments here before and some of what was played out through Brexit had a frightening ring of familiarity to it. There's a certain element of walking into the sea and not realising. But I don't think it's by any means past the point of no return. There's a possibility that Britain could do alright outside of the EU (and I'm not meaning economic terms here, but rather culturally and socially) and the government - in whatever form that may be - into the future will undoubtedly have to work hard to keep that destructive nationalism in check, because it has been let out of the box and been encouraged. If the worst that results is that Britain remains the only country in Europe to have imposed sanctions on itself, then its possible it won't be as dire as some predictions. 

 

Anyway, that's all a political digression and not a lot to do with the cost of pens!