animist wrote:Nick wrote:
I appreciate that it wasn't written by the Indie, but they should have reported it for the tosh it is, shouldn't they?
Not as another scare story.
I am not so sure that it is tosh or a scare. Read it more carefully. It may be that, under WTO rules in case of Ultrahard Brexit, Britain must impose the same tariffs on EU food and other imports as it does on those imports from elsewhere. Of course, this would be avoided by abolishing all these tariffs, as you want to do!
Thanks for acknowledging that I want the abolition of tariffs.
Now let's look at just one section.
Food retailers would face the toughest challenge, given that almost three quarters of what we eat is imported from the EU. Some tariffs on meat and dairy products would rise to more than 80% causing an inevitable surge in food inflation to hit families.
Meat and dairy is subject to tariffs of 80% under WTO rules!
Seriously? When you remember that one of the arguments levied against joining the EEC in the first place was the fact that we would no longer be able to import meat and dairy products from the Commonwealth (Australia and New Zealand in particular) as cheaply as before! Can it be true that since then, WTO rules, designed to lower tariffs, would have instead risen them so dramatically? And think on. The first thing any government would do is to agree, double quick, a tariff-free agreement for those imports with any country in the world. The EU, given that it already subsidises agriculture because it is more expensive to produce than the world price, would be raving nuts to cut off an export market as large as the UK.
Incidentally, there is also a school of thought that VAT should be extended to food anyway, with corresponding increases in benefits and reductions in taxes elsewhere, to reduce food waste and increase incentives. So with tariffs at 80% (hahahahaha!) the revenue would be huge! Think what tax cuts we could introduce!