On Hungarian wine and McDonald’s milkshakes

Permit me to be extremely middle-class for a little while. I have been visiting Hungary regularly for nearly 25 years now. In that time, I have learned a lot about that country, both good and bad. One of the good things about Hungary is its wine. There’s a lot more to Hungarian wine than Tokaji and Bulls’ Blood (and if you associate Bulls’ Blood with ropey red wine at 80s student parties, you’re 30 years out of date). But since Hungary is a relatively small wine-producing country with a smart middle-class that is knowledgeable about wine and willing to pay for it, not much Hungarian wine gets out to the wider world.

So for the last few years, once or twice a year, I’ve been ordering shipments from Hungary. Sometimes I’ve gone direct to some of the larger wineries. More often, I’ve used specialist wine merchants in Hungary to put together mixed cases from small wineries for me. I don’t need all that much wine: together with what I buy from elsewhere, six cases a year is usually ample to keep me ticking over (which, when you think about it, works out at just over a bottle a week). It isn’t a particularly cheap operation because good Hungarian wine is not particularly cheap, and then there’s the shipping to be paid for as well. Still, it’s something I have enjoyed doing, bringing me a bit of second home from home.

But no more. Since the beginning of this year, the bureaucracy involved in organising such a shipment is too great. I cannot persuade any of the wineries or even the specialist wine merchants to undertake such a torment. I can’t really blame them. I only ever represented a small order for them. Why on earth should they put themselves through all the hassle when they can easily sell their produce in Hungary or elsewhere in the EU? They’re small enterprises and it just isn’t worth their while getting the knowhow to do this. Life is too short.

In all this, I am the main loser. The wineries and specialist wine merchants are marginally affected. I, however, have lost a simple pleasure.

It is not the only simple pleasure that I have lost this year. I liked to get a specific olive oil from the south of Italy. It comes from a fairly small manufacturer that has won many awards for its produce. It used to ship to the UK. Not any more. Again, I don’t blame them. It’s a lot of hassle for nothing very much really.

Similarly, I liked to get Keurig capsules for my Nespresso machine from an Italian supplier. They too have stopped shipping to the UK. Same reason.

As I said, I’m being extremely middle class. I expect you’re reading this thinking something like: “poor flower, such first world problems” and smiling to yourself. “He’ll just have to slum it with the Wine Society and Waitrose”, you might be thinking.

Perhaps you also smirked when the guy on the vox pop told the reporter how he was distraught that he couldn’t get his McDonald’s milkshake. I can’t say I identify with his emotion. An ex of mine used to call it “baby shit” and that’s close to my feelings on that product. Still, I won’t quickly dismiss his feelings, given my wine crisis. And you can’t pretend that’s about him being extremely middle class though.

If you smirked, I have a few hard points for you to consider. Both McDonald’s man and I have suffered tangible detriments to our lifestyles because of past and present policy decisions. As I will explain, these tangible detriments are quietly taking place in many many ways and some of them look likely to continue indefinitely. If you are going to argue that we need to take the rough because there’s going to be smooth (possibly not for me but for others), you need to make your case clearly.

When you make such points to committed Leavers, you get two reactions: surly and mystical. The surly reaction comes in various guises. The most common is to complain about the premise, arguing that it is nothing to do with Brexit.

So far as my middle class problems are concerned, that’s pretty hard, because they are a direct consequence of the bureaucracy that comes with Brexit, but it doesn’t stop them trying. They argue that the restrictions are from the EU’s conditions not the UK’s policy choices. This makes no sense, but then they don’t need it to make sense because they’re only seeking to persuade themselves.

There is a huge point here to be considered. The effect of the massive increase in bureaucracy to and from the EU is to favour large importers (and exporters) at the expense of smaller businesses. Any increase in bureaucracy is good for big business because they have the carrying capacity to be able to cope with it and smaller companies don’t. Sainsbury’s will have processes in place for importing wine into the UK. Small family wineries in rural Hungary won’t.

This transfers power from small companies to big companies in two different ways. First, those small companies who decide to stick with it become more reliant on big companies to deal with this stuff for them. And secondly, quite a lot of small companies will just opt out: the marginal benefit has become too marginal.

This is a complete inversion of trends over the last few decades. The internet brought in the concept of The Long Tail, as memorably described in Chris Anderson’s 2006 book of that name. The subtitle of that book summed up the thesis well: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. With the demise of shelves on which products need to pay rent, more and more varieties of products could coexist and appeal to more and more niche markets.

That thesis stood the test of time over the last 15 years. It is reliant, however, not just on increased online shopping but also on minimising bureaucracy. Brexit has added a cascade of bureaucracy, sending the trend into an immediate sharp reverse. So consumers are going to have considerably reduced choice, often in areas that they care strongly about (food, drink, fashion). Often, people see the ability to make very niche choices as signalling aspects of their personality. If they’re not going to be able to make those choices, they’re going to feel that part of their personality has been chipped off. This is not a small thing.

There is no quick remedy. The bureaucracy has been imposed and the government is determined to keep it in place (indeed, it is due to ratchet up, though that ratcheting-up is likely to be deferred for a while longer). The shortened tail will remain docked.

Now you may argue that in time, the tail will regrow with importers from other countries. Perhaps — though no trade deal under consideration is anything like as far-reaching as that Britain had when it was in the EU, so I doubt it. In any case, how long will it take? You are effectively asking present generations to feel the brunt of the detriment for future generations’ possible (unspecified) benefit. And in any case, why do you want to favour big business at small businesses’ expense? Most governments want to help small business as much as they can.

At this point, surly Leavers become mystical. But I have more to say about their surliness, so I shall come back to this later.

McDonald’s man’s problems have different origins from my own. They come from shortages caused by problems with the supply chain. These are not intrinsically required by Brexit.

Views differ on how long this crisis will last. The Prime Minister reckons it will all be over by Christmas (he also reckoned that Britain could turn the tide on Covid-19 in 12 weeks). Conversely, the Food & Drink Federation’s chief executive described the supply chain problem as permanent.

Time will tell. I hope for Boris Johnson’s sake that it will all be over by Christmas. At least when Oliver Cromwell cancelled Christmas, it was a deliberate policy and not incompetence.

There are those, most of whom have a union flag in their twitter handle, who stalwartly deny that the supply chain problems have anything to do with Brexit. While Brexit is not the only cause, this stance seems pretty unsustainable. While other countries are certainly experiencing driver shortages, actual shortages of goods are being felt more or less exclusively in the UK. The trucking companies themselves see Brexit as part of the reason why driver numbers are so sharply down and they see a reversal of the Brexit immigration restrictions as a vital measure to deal with the problem. This is a solution that the government obdurately refuses to consider. The government’s preferred solution is to allow less safe drivers to drive lorries.

As it happens, I very much doubt whether relaxing immigration requirements for HGV drivers would by itself do much to alleviate the problem. Those drivers who left the UK to return to their EU homelands are by definition highly mobile and they have plenty of options right now. Why would they come back to the UK when their welcome here would obviously be highly contingent and potentially short-lived? (The answer is likely to be more cash than they would get elsewhere.)

My view is beside the point. This is a different manifestation of bureaucracy and it is at least as bad as the one affecting me. Under the previous system, Britain had ready access to a large pool of workers who were drawn by job opportunities without friction. Willingness to find job opportunities internationally turned out to be strongly correlated with educational attainment and dynamism. The employment rate among EU migrants was well above that of the local population (and most of the rest would have been studying or partners). But the government decided that wasn’t good enough. So it imposed a statist approach.

So without anyone really noticing, Brexit has ushered in an era of big government where government assesses industry recruitment needs and their social desirability. The government has a terrible track record in assessing business recruitment needs and already in the haulage industry we are seeing the government asserting its judgement in direct opposition to the loudly-stated requests of industry. The government has no track record of nimbleness in this area and if it doesn’t get one quickly, whole industries may well be stifled.

What makes this particularly odd is that most of the most strident advocates of Brexit have historically been scathing about government’s abilities in these areas and highly opposed to bureaucracy. Some still profess to hold those beliefs, without ever explaining how they reconcile them with support for Brexit. Instead, they go mystical about the possibilities.

Except they rarely articulate any clear possibilities. Will they do a trade deal with the USA (that looks unlikely just now)? They waffle about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The dottier ones imagine some CANZUK union, as if 90 years had not passed since the Statute of Westminster. But most of them prefer just to go mystical about unspecified possibilities, resembling nothing so much as Christopher Robin when he mused on his teatime possibilities:

Shall I go off to South America?

Shall I put out my ship to sea?

Or get in my cage and be lions and tigers?

Or — shall I only be Me?

But while they’re getting in their cages and playing at being lions and tigers, the rest of us are missing out on everyday convenience and ordinary things that we value in our lives. Right now, that looks like a really rubbish deal.