My local Tesco Express was half-empty today with remaining products about to expire. It has suddenly made the stockpiling of tins before Brexit worthwhile.
Of course, some people think I'm making this up for the fun of it, so here's the pitta bread I got that expires today.
I assumed people had seen enough pictures of empty shelves on Twitter to get the idea but obviously needed to provide proof.
It's not like I'm the first person to have seen empty supermarket shelves. There are actual signs in supermarkets apologising for the lack of the usual products.
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The EU's "Handbook for EU Exporters of plants and plant products to India" published in January this year mentions the UK as an exporter of apples to India in 2019. So it doesn't look like there has been a "50-year ban" as claimed by ministers.
"With the ongoing ban on imports of Chinese apples, the EU exporters hold a chance for sizeable increase in the market share. Also, the trade dispute between India and US has halved the imports of apples to India from US providing improved opportunity for EU suppliers."
India may have made it easier and more profitable for the UK to export apples by allowing them to be refrigerated in transit to protect against fruit fly rather than before shipping. How profitable that really will be is another question.
The protocol wasn't designed to operate in reality, David Frost says.
"The situation is now urgent. The UK and Ireland have a huge, and very direct, interest in finding solutions here. But we need constructive and ambitious discussions with the EU which deal with the actual reality." irishtimes.com/opinion/david-…
"Either way, we need to find a way forward, a new balance of arrangements, adapted to the practical reality of what we have seen since January, and based on the common interests we all share."
A new report by the Board of Trade actually contains the line "Without trade, the average UK consumer would be a third worse off."
This part is great too.
Apparently Boris Johnson said last year: "Free trade is God’s diplomacy – the only certain way of uniting people in the bonds of peace since the more freely goods cross borders
the less likely it is that troops will ever cross borders.”
To stop Brexit all the government needed to do was to tell us that you would pay an extra £82 for a £200 coat. Or that you wouldn't be able to bring a ham sandwich into the EU, or tour the EU as a musician. But they didn't boast about these Brexit benefits, did they?
The field behind your house will be torn up and turned into a lorry park and drivers will use the hedges as a toilet? They didn't mention that.
Your EU customers will stop ordering from you because it's too much hassle? Didn't mention it.
I was sacked from the civil service for asking a question but the government is sending in gunboats.
And they said oh of course we don't mind you asking a question, but you have to understand HOW we do things in the civil service. Then didn't tell me how to do it.
Because apparently civil servants are super diplomatic and can be horribly offended if you ask them something.