All I know is I landed here in Paris a few hours ago, and Uber drivers were blocking all of the roads in and out of the airport in protest of regulations favoring Taxi drivers. My Uber driver assured me he would not join the protest until after he got me to my office. 
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I thought that was one of the guiding principles of the EU and part of the reason for brexit - you could subsidise as you see fit.
Farming subsidies are so interesting to me, every country does it to a certain extent - free trade deals in Australia always seems to get caught up on details around tariffs/subsidies/portectionism. For some reason I thought the EU had equalised it somehow…. I must be miles off!
Broadly, the German constitution strongly limits the extent to which the budget can involve deficit spending - this is the so -called schwarze Null, the black zero, or the principle that the budget should be basically balanced.
In the pandemic, the coalition used emergency funding which overrode the black zero but this being Germany, managed not to spend all of it, and ended up with a €60bn surplus. The government diverted the surplus into the KTF, the climate and transformation fund, which as it sounds is (was) intended to support the transition to low-carbon technologies.
The argument was that this was against the constitution because it provided an unjustifiable end run around the schwarze Null - a future government could use an emergency to justify going into a larger-than-necessary deficit, and then divert the excess into the budget. The Bundesverfassungsgericht, the constitutional court, agreed and pulled the plug on the scheme, spectacularly screwing up the federal budget for the year.
Obviously this is much duller than the US version of shutting down the government every year in a spate of willy-waving, or the UK version of shamefacedly going deeper into debt while pretending not to.
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Thanks for the extra explanation!
I also heard on the news radio that they were withdrawing fuel subsidies for farmers as the cause of the protest
If it is like australia, the government puts huge tax markups on fuel to pay for externalities (roads etx). The logic is for those that use fuel that doesn’t use roads, they don’t out the tax - mining and farming for example.
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Yep. Mrs StC is about to head home from the office and there are a lot of blocked roads full of tractors around where she works. Google maps does not look good. Interesting times…
You sir, have made my day.
What an amazing change. Why not also put “not for North Korea, Russia or Yemen” on it as well?
The Pentagon response in the last paragraph is nice.
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The checks are like paying for insurance. If youre convinced nothing bad is going to happen, then why pay?
As an added benefit, if something bad does happen, its not like its going to bother the tories anyway
Much as I like to point and laugh when these Brexit benefits come up, I’m not sure how printing one extra line of text on the packaging can make that much difference. My guess is even that it means there is only one packaging type for the whole UK and therefore more cost-effective?
I suspect the food industry just don’t like people asking what’s wrong with the contents of said packaging if the EU won’t accept it.
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Because of regulatory divergence, there will have to be two production lines; one for the EU, and one for the UK. UK producers cannot afford to ignore the EU because the market is too big and there are always sales to be made, but it means complying with EU standards. They also can’t then ignore the UK side because that is where a lot of sales are made, but they need to change the packaging so nothing produced for the UK (with lower standards, so more cheaply) can be moved to the EU and sold there for a higher profit.
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Surprised there wasn’t a migrant link in there somehwere 