I Resolve

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 1^st 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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[1] Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally; Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel; The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis

Another New Normal

Six years ago, I wrote a blog about bereavement called The New Normal. I doubted then that I had invented the expression, it’s just a combination of three mundane words after all. From some cursory research, it seems that the first recorded use of the expression is from 1918, in an article by Henry Wise Wood in the National Electric Light Association Bulletin, an American publication in which he wrote of “the new normal” in the wake of The Great War.

Since then the phrase has been used to describe life after 9/11, and after the global recession in 2008. When I wrote my blog about bereavement in 2014, I was not consciously aware of the expression, but it is the way of things that words, phrases, and expressions worm their way into our subconscious and pop up as though they were original thoughts.

The life we have to look forward to after coronavirus is being described as another “new normal.” That expression, together with the single word “unprecedented” as in, “we live in unprecedented times,” is becoming so overworked that there is little chance of anyone slipping it into an article or a conversation and genuinely thinking it is their own original thought, not for a long while.

What we consider normal may never return, but we are fortunate in having today’s technology while we face this pandemic. In particular, the internet and contactless payment methods have made our lives more tolerable. Had this pandemic struck in the days before those technologies were available it’s difficult to imagine how we could have coped.

Being retired, the question does not arise, but my job – at least at the end of my working life – would have enabled me to work from home, and my wife worked from home for a few years before taking redundancy in 2019. Much of Britain’s workforce faces many and various stresses and strains at present. For essential workers, and especially those who use public transport, there are necessary precautions they must take to safeguard themselves from infection. There are those whose jobs have been furloughed, those who have been laid off, and those who are on precarious contracts. These people ought to be at the heart of government thinking when weighing up how to loosen the lockdown.

For government, balancing the health of the nation with its economic wellbeing is a delicate task.  An increase in unemployment is going to be one inevitable consequence in the aftermath of the government’s response to coronavirus, although it has to be said that the government are making a small contribution towards addressing this with the news that 50,000 people will be needed to fill out customs forms in the wake of Britain leaving the EU in January 2021.

Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove announced this week that these agents would be required due to Britain’s more complex trading relationship with the EU come January next year. Training sufficient customs agents will require the creation of an online “customs agent academy” according to Mr Gove. It would be an ambitious undertaking at the best of times, and while it’s not entirely clear whether this represents 50,000 new jobs, retraining existing employees, or a combination of the two, it is especially challenging while the country is in the grip of a pandemic.

In addition, the EU has said that Britain must immediately start building customs posts in Northern Ireland. This is in response to Boris Johnson’s January announcement that he was preparing to impose full customs and border checks on all European goods entering the UK after Brexit. The Telegraph said at the time that Johnson was planning “a radical departure from pre-election ‘no deal’ planning that prioritised the smooth flow of goods into the UK from Europe. Whitehall departments have been told to prepare for imposing the full panoply of checks on EU imports to the UK.”

Implementing such a programme – which rather implies that a trade deal with the EU was not going to be forthcoming, even before coronavirus cramped negotiators’ style – will be challenging in the highly probable event that there are at least some lingering restrictions to mobility and with some form of social distancing in place come next January.

There have been suggestions that Britain should apply for an extension of the Transition Period, which would need to be done by the end of June, which is to say in eight weeks’ time. Former Tory cabinet minister Sir David Lidington, who was Theresa May’s deputy, thinks that a six-month extension is inevitable. Michael Gove, however has dismissed calls for an extension; he insists that it is “plain prudence” to adhere to the current timetable. Not since Gordon Brown’s flirtation with the concept has prudence been so carelessly dallied with.

I can perfectly understand that strict adherents to the cause of Brexit must be frustrated that Britain remains even now a member of the EU; I can appreciate that using COVID-19 as a reason for extending the transition period will be seen by many people as just another excuse for dragging our feet. I can see that many ardent Brexiteers will feel that even if a delay is agreed because of coronavirus, that will not be the end of it, there will be something else that pops up after that to further postpone Britain’s departure from the EU.

I can also see coronavirus having a terminal impact on the EU itself. The arrival of coronavirus in Europe was met, not by increased co-operation between member states of the EU, but by a collective raising of drawbridges. Britain, despite having been a proponent of increased border controls in the past, has kept its borders open to a much greater extent than the other 27 EU members. Self-interest, and a widening divide between Europe’s wealthier northern states and its poorer relations in the south, is pointing towards a financial crisis in the union that could contribute towards its ultimate demise as anything other than as a trading bloc.

Given that even some staunch Tory Brexiteers have accepted in the past that a no-deal departure from the EU would cause problems in the supply chain and impact the nation’s short-term prosperity, and that some of Brexit's benefits might not become apparent for another generation – Jacob Rees Mogg  suggested that it might take fifty years – hurtling toward a no-deal Brexit now does seem like a negligent policy of self-harm. If the EU comes out of the coronavirus mortally wounded as an institution, or at least significantly scaled back towards a more user-friendly trading alliance, Britain could retain the trading benefits of the union, but lose the add-ons that the Leave campaign wanted rid of and without the actual pain of leaving.

We are fortunate that Brexit did not happen in January this year. Road hauliers, supermarkets and government ministers all admitted last year that a no-deal Brexit would probably lead to delays in stock reaching the shops, and some shortages. The empty shelves we experienced in supermarkets a couple of months ago had more to do with excess demand and panic buying than it did with interruptions in the supply chain. Imagine how much worse matters would have been had the supply chain been interrupted or disrupted by new customs checks on imported goods?

Still, for those who enjoy invoking the War-time spirit, the possible introduction of rationing would have made their experience even more authentic. I wouldn’t rule it out come next January if Britain’s divorce from the EU is on the terms of no-deal. Mind you, French President Emmanuel Macron recently said (about the failure to reach agreement on an economic response to the pandemic), “What’s at stake is the survival of the European project.” If rifts that seemed to have been exposed become wider, then come January maybe there will be nothing for Britain to leave anyway.