*“It would probably be very useful for a basketball competition,” Poole Harbour Commissioners’ chief tells POLITICO. *
Sporting a high-viz jacket and a radiant smile, former Maritime Minister Charlotte Vere declared a £2.3 million Brexit border inspection facility in the port of Poole officially open for business.
Spanning over 2,000 square meters and boasting two large unloading bays, inspection rooms and refrigeration facilities, the new border control post was well equipped to deal with the expected influx of imports from the European Union.
Eight months on from the ribbon-cutting ceremony, however, and the atmosphere at the port is decidedly less jubilant.
Since the former Conservative government introduced physical checks on imports of plant and animal products from the EU in April, the border control post has conducted a grand total of two checks. This is certainly not what the previous administration had in mind when it splashed out £1.8 million on the facility through its post-Brexit Port Infrastructure Fund.
The idea that Britain needed sanitary checks for produce coming from the EU is hilarious - the EU not only has the same technological level and includes nations which are very similar or even beyond to Britain in terms of social and technological development, but also a lot of nations which are significantly warmer for most of the year than even the southernmost points of Britain and were any kind of biological contamination quickly grows into a problem, so its rules naturally tend to be the kind that both pays attention to material contamination (such as heavy metal contamination) AND biological contamination.
I expect the EU has actually better phytosanitary rules than Britain, thanks to this mix of awareness of the dangers of certain contaminants and actual greater need for it in the biological contaminant side (since in a Single Market all food has to be suitable for any place in that market, including the kind of countries with just the right average temperature for mold and bacteria to grow fast).
Now, if Britain imports food from outside the EU that transits through the EU (which means sealed containers which arenever considered as imported into the EU hence don’t have to obbey EU rules), then yeah, depending on the origin that’s might very well be needed.
It almost sounds like they may not have thought this through fully…
You mean it’s a bad idea to base policy on a sign on the side of a bus?
I am not from the UK so it is not my place to say one way or another…
But many people who voted for it directly are saying exactly that, yes! They say “how dare you, what were you thinking, allowing us to make such an important choice as that!?”
That is what makes me think that democracy has lost. Even The People seem to no longer want it. It takes real effort to get stuff done, and if we don’t maintain our shit, then it falls apart.:-(
“We are hugely conscious of the fact that there is a government-run facility across at Sevington and we can’t be any more expensive,” he said, referring to Britain’s biggest border control post. “We have to be competitive with the inland facility in order for those food imports to continue through Portsmouth.”
Does that mean that border protection itself is a competitive, privatised business in the UK??
How American of them if so.
I was recently at the airport in Amsterdam, going from San Francisco to Berlin. The EU passports line (like always) was non existent while the non EU line was nearly an hour long. I almost missed my flight (and my checked bag did) but it was totally worth it to see all the pissed off Brits complaining about having to wait.
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