Here we are, a week into 2021: How are your New Year’s resolutions going? Did you even make any? I didn’t, and rarely have in the past. Any I made usually didn’t last 24 hours.
The problem with New Year’s resolutions is that most involve
giving something up, whether it’s smoking, alcohol, eating too much, or
gambling. These are either addictions or things that people really enjoy, so deep
down, giving them up is the last thing you want to do. Ideally, if one wants to
make a success of a resolution to quit doing something, it should be something
you don’t like doing anyway; unfortunately, these turn out to be things you’re
not allowed to give up, like work or visiting the in-laws.
Over indulging at Christmas and resolving, on Boxing Day, to give up some habit or vice a week later makes little sense. Give it up there and then, or don’t give it up at all. When I went for counselling to stop smoking, the first thing I was told was that you don’t finish whatever you have left and then give up, you give up immediately. So, no finishing that last pack of cigarettes, no finishing the beer that’s in the fridge, no last bet, just stop, full stop, period.
The flip side of giving up is the resolution to do something positive. Join a gym, read good books, take more exercise, take a course in flower arranging or cyber security, something that improves the mind, body, or soul. Every year (apart from this one), Fitness First, Nuffield, David Lloyd, and all the other gyms see a surge in membership in January, are packed to the gunwales for a few weeks, then see their new members fall by the wayside in February.
And books:How many copies of worthy books like Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, or Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (25 million copies sold) have been purchased and discarded unfinished, or barely started? The Booker Prize list is where many people start when they want to find a serious, worthy, improving novel, and although most winners are best sellers, I bet many are enjoyed much less than the novels of non-prize-winning authors. For full disclosure, I submit that I have read just three of the winners since the prize was instituted in 1969.[1]
Courses get dropped, exercise tails off, improved diet lapses into a regime of fast food and sugar laden soft drinks as the majority of people lack self-discipline and will power, but first and foremost, we are set in our ways and all of these resolutions require change, and change is painful. Some also require more time than we are prepared to sacrifice.
There’s an expression – New Year, New You – that we have all heard and possibly wanted to embrace. It’s seductive, but potentially poisonous. If you want to change – and change is hard, change is painful – do it when you need to, when you want to, not because the calendar has changed.
Do I resolve to change in 2021? Do I have a shopping list of things I will stop doing, or start doing, or do more of? No, but I do resolve that as far as my blog goes, after this one, I will not write about Brexit unless something very dramatic happens or affects me directly. Ditto, covid (although that may be much harder to avoid).
As far as Brexit goes, my position is the same as it was when the EU referendum debate was in full swing in 2016. The EU has many flaws, and a sensibly negotiated exit on the back of a significant Leave majority may have been beneficial for this country. My fear in 2016 was that the actual act of negotiating how Britain would disengage from the EU would be a clusterfuck, particularly since Leave’s margin of victory was so small. Nothing I have seen in the last four and a half years persuades me otherwise.
Still, the majority of us may see little difference post-Brexit. Queuing at European airports for passport control (when we can actually go back to the Continent for holidays), a return to Duty Free limitations (with baggage restrictions on most airlines, not many people bring back ‘cheap’ booze or fags any more, anyway) are minor inconveniences, although for Britons who own homes in Europe and don’t have dual nationality, the 90 days in 180 rule will be a problem they have to work round. And for those UK citizens now permanently resident in the EU, some will find that if they have a UK bank account, their bankers will shortly be requiring them to make alternative arrangements, as some passporting arrangements are not available to financial institutions based in a third country, which the UK now is.
News to me was the introduction on 1st January 2021 of a new method for the treatment of VAT on goods arriving in Britain, not just from the EU, but worldwide. In the interests of treating companies in EU and non-EU countries which sell to UK consumers in the same way, these companies will have to register with HM Revenue & Customs, and collect and pay VAT on HMRC’s behalf on orders under £135. Some companies have decided that this is too onerous and have ceased selling to UK consumers, as my elder daughter has discovered, as a company that she regularly buys from and who are based in Europe, will no longer ship to this country.
Former Star Trek actor William Shatner has similarly decided that his online store – based of course in the USA - will no longer be available to UK consumers. As he explained on Twitter back in October, he had decided that the costs of collecting the VAT and filing returns were prohibitive.
How much this affects me or you is difficult to assess (I’ve never bought anything from William Shatner, heck, I didn’t even know he had an online store), but I have bought plenty of stuff online from European retailers, so chances are I may find some products unavailable to me in future.
An immediate benefit of Brexit is the zero-rating of VAT on feminine hygiene products – the so-called Tampon Tax – albeit it’s too early to know if the benefits will be passed on to the consumer or retained by manufacturers or retailers.
Both of these changes – one a benefit, one a potential drawback – are relatively small beer. The major pros and cons that will accrue from Brexit won’t be known for months, or years, or as Jacob Rees-Mogg said in 2018, maybe not for fifty years.
I can’t wait for Rees-Mogg’s fifty year timescale to elapse
(I’ll be long dead by then), so I will inevitably return to the subject of
Brexit before then, but I resolve to hang on as long as possible.
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