Well here we are. Crunch time. It’s been crunch time all year in many ways, but the next month may well be the crunchiest.
First, we have the covid vaccination programme. From the pictures I saw of mask-free people shopping in Regents Street I got the impression that they had already had their jabs and were walking around with total immunity. Merely announcing we have a vaccine ready to be rolled out seems to be a signal that all the rules will go out of the window. Sadly, with the free-for-all Christmas coming up, the old and vulnerable will be the victims again because the vaccine will not be there in time to protect them from the lunacy of others.
If nothing else it confirms my belief that we have become a nation dedicated to self-interest, a want-it-all society, that wants it now, regardless of the impact and risk our actions may have on others. Inevitably we will pay for it. Those who complained about the lockdown, and contributed to its second wave and maybe third coming, will be complaining because companies who scraped through the first lockdown will not survive the second or third, jobs will go. And because we have had to extend our world credit there will be tax rises, which those same people will complain about.
Second, I’d be willing to bet those same people will be complaining about Brexit in a few months when the cost of living has gone up and the job market is slow in recovering. The crunch is not so much the next few weeks when we finally do/don’t conclude a trade agreement. The crunch will be for the thousands of businesses who will not have had time to get all the paperwork in place to continue trading and for those who had not recognised the implications.
For example, the fishing industry. What few people in the UK realise is that most of the fish we eat is imported, most of the fish we catch is exported. Why, you may ask. Simple, the Brits don’t like the fish we catch around our coast and those on the Continent do. So we take total control (eventually) of our fishing waters, but we may well lose the market for that fish because of tariffs.
Taking back control will probably prove a pointless exercise. We may be able to set our own standards, but if those standards don’t meet those of the country we are exporting to, then there will be no exports. Of course, if we want to drop our standards and import, say chlorinated chicken from the USA, in return for a trade deal, so be it. The problem is not just the chlorination, it’s the way the chicken is reared, killed and processed. Chlorination merely eliminates 90% of the bacteria that will cause illness or death, which means there is 10% still in the meat. We, as part of the EU, banned chlorinated chicken over 20 years ago because it doesn’t guarantee high levels of hygiene.
Anything we want to sell to Europe, which was 46% of our exports last year, will have to conform to their rules and from January may well be subject to a tariff which makes the UK more expensive to trade with. Not only will we be paying more for goods from Europe (over half of the food we import comes from Europe), but we may have to drop our prices for the goods and services we sell to Europe to remain competitive.
Big crunch.