Well over a year ago I started writing about my concerns at how some elements of the automotive industry seem happy – perhaps intentionally – to mislead the motorist in their cynical use of names for car makes and models. I am irritated by the exploitation of the concept of ‘Britishness’ put about especially by […]
“The 7 million-plus NHS waiting list, the 2 million-plus fall in the labour force, the world-beating rate of inflation and spiralling mortgage rates are all the result of a succession of bad policy choices made by Conservative Ministers at crucial times in the past 13 years.” Words of truth and wisdom spoken by a Labour […]
Let’s leave aside for a moment the whole issue of democracy, sovereignty and ‘taking back control’ which is covered in this article from Jon Danzig, and instead call out the abject gaslighting and lies being spewed out to defend a lamentable deal that has some real nasties hidden inside it. It’s not for nothing that […]
Britain is joining an 11-member Asia-Pacific trade bloc, the CPTP. The UK government thinks this is a suitable replacement for our membership of the EU. But when did we have a say on this? When did Parliament consent to this? Brexiters often claim that the EU is undemocratic and that we should have had a […]
It’s two years on from Brexit and so it’s timely to look at the current transit times from our suppliers and cost changes around the EU. As a recap, it used to be door-to-door ten days max for all EU collections. The average single pallet collection cost £180. All fairly standard. Today, after trying out […]
Last week the government ratified the first new trade deal since Brexit – and your MP didn’t get to vote on it. Is this what the Brexiteers meant by taking back control? I’m talking about the UK-Australia trade deal. It is fairly insignificant in economic terms, the government’s official impact assessment suggests the increased trade […]
More than a year ago we published this article about two small businesses being ruined by Brexit. We now have an update from the second of those profiled – Steve Shovlar. Over to you, Steve. (Oh, and just to explain, ‘Sir’ Steve references the ludicrous award of a knighthood to Gavin Williamson, a serial failure […]
The CPTPP Pacific Trade Deal is throwing the environment and British farming under the bus in a desperate bid to justify Brexit, argues Simon Oldridge. I just listened to my MP, Anthony Mangnall, singing the praises of the Trans-Pacific trade deal (CPTPP) without a single mention of environment or climate in the entire 35 minute podcast. […]
Imagine that you run an innovative, environmentally sustainable enterprise which employs your wife, your kids and ten local people. You’ve been in the business for over 30 years and you know exactly what you’re doing. You and your family have invested decades’ worth of emotion, aspiration, knowledge and money in it. You’ve won the industry’s […]
This 2019 article is from Tom Scott and Molly Scott Cato’s Cabinet of Horrors blog. It remains extremely pertinent, especially so given Truss’s move to ‘negotiate’ Brexit following Frost’s resignation. That’s the same Brexit Johnson and Frost claim to have got done… It would be easy to dismiss Liz Truss as an intellectual lightweight, and […]
This week saw the Conservatives’ announcement of major changes to the way the alcohol taxation system will work from February 2023. At first the hype created by the Treasury’s PR department was as if they had reinvented the wheel. What they had actually done was pull a major con on the public. The proposal to […]
The term ‘supply chain’ is bandied around frequently in discussions about Brexit. Since it appears that some cabinet ministers have a somewhat hazy grasp of the phrase, I wonder if it would be helpful to explain it in simple terms. I am not trying to imply that readers of West Country Voices have an understanding […]
Liz Truss, the cheese obsessive who counts rollover trade deals as the sign of the dawn of a new era for ‘global Britain’ and crows about flogging a few stiltons to the famously-lactose intolerant Japanese has hit diplomacy for six with her gleeful appointment of Brexit-fanatic Botham as trade envoy to Australia. Ennobled for his […]
You may have already seen the story that Plants Galore in Newton Abbot, Plymouth and Exeter will be giving away £100,000 worth of stock because of Brexit. WCB had also been sent a press release from the Horticultural Trades Association (HTA) about a recent visit by Brexit-backing MP for South East Cornwall, Sheryll Murray, to […]
So now we know that the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has drawn the short straw for building the Prime Minister’s latest vanity project. The good news is that, notwithstanding the regular damning reports of its performance, Defence Equipment and Support does know a bit about acquisition and programme management. There are no other departments that […]
Blessed are the cheesemakers, for they will inherit Liz Truss’s vision of the earth. Trade secretary Liz Truss is famous for her obsession with cheese. Unfortunately this zeal does not translate into recognition of the damage done to the UK’s cheese businesses by Brexit. Instead, it manifests itself in maniacal enthusiasm for miniscule trade deals […]
We still do not know the final details of the Australia trade deal signed off by cabinet last week – but what we do know is the ‘shape of the deal’. Australia is to obtain tariff and quota free access to the UK market in agricultural goods – with domestic farmers protected by having this […]
Let me start by saying that I am not a farmer, and I voted to remain in the EU. Until last year, when I got involved with the Save British Farming campaign, I bought into the general idea that the vast majority of farmers had voted to leave. I wasn’t a big fan of the […]
On 17 May reports began to emerge of a split in Cabinet. In one corner, Liz Truss and David Frost advocate throwing British farming under the big red bus of lies by signing a 0-per-cent tariff/quota deal with Australia. This is a deal that will only yield 0.01 to 0.02 per cent of our 2018 […]
It would be fair to say that businesses in Somerset are now really starting to feel the effects of Brexit and our new trade deals with the EU and the rest of the world. From all the businesses I have spoken to so far the effects have ranged from bureaucratic nightmares with unnecessary paperwork and […]
I am bent double, cringing as I write this. So much going on. The bombast expended on a football super-league by a prime minister who offered to sell Newcastle United off to some Saudi royal as a sweetener in a dodgy deal. The revelations of Johnson offering to fix a billionaire Tory donor’s tax —shocking […]
They say history is written by the victors. But what happens when the victors of the Brexit referendum and the ‘Get Brexit Done’ election go on to preside over a series of unprecedented national calamities and scandals? And how might the history of the last couple of years look if subjected to Johnsonian levels of […]
It has been more than three months since the UK completed the transition period and officially entered into new trading terms with the EU (although grace periods are still in place). The deal which was rushed through at the end of December and implemented on the 1 January has already affected how our local businesses […]
Maybe our shortest article yet! It’s simple. Brexit is bad for business. End of. Oh…and we did this to ourselves. Not the EU’s fault. Alexander Stubb, former prime and finance minister of Finland, spells it out: Write to your MP and explain that we need to get back into the single market and the customs […]
Despite the best efforts of 87 per cent of the mainstream media (by circulation) trying to distract you from the battering Brexit is giving to business up and down the UK, news is at last filtering through. And, bad as this news is, we have yet to see the worst because the Trade and Cooperation […]
Back in January the reality of the UK leaving the EU and trading under the newly-agreed trade deal had come into force. I had spoken to Barry of BJW logistics ltd, a small logistics firm that specialises in transporting goods (particularly antiques and artworks) to and from Europe. Barry, who has decades of experience and […]
Globally renowned wine importer, exporter and distributor Daniel Lambert has become something of a hero in our book. He’s one of a handful of people who have been brave enough to stand up and tell the truth about what Brexit has done to his own business and the sector as a whole, and to campaign […]
You may have seen the summary of the catastrophic impact of Brexit on the principal exports of foodstuffs to the EU. Not pretty at all and terrible news for our domestic producers. Good news for the EU’s growers, farmers and fishers, though. (Not the uniquely Scots’ whisky, of course, but maybe the cut in supply […]
Data published 22 March by UK Food & Drink Federation showed exports of food & drink to the EU from the UK dropped by more than 75 per cent in January. There was a 40 per cent decline in exports overall, and business leaders are saying that this is almost entirely due to Brexit. A […]
One of the ways in which the current government remains popular despite clear evidence of corruption and incompetence is by selling comforting illusions to its core supporters. The idea of ‘Global Britain’ is one such fantasy. It paints a picture of a country that ‘punches above its weight’, is a ‘sovereign equal’ of a trading […]