https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/aug/19/craft-beer-boom-uk-firms-bust-brexit
More than a hundred breweries have shut in the past two years as new trade barriers were compounded by Covid and tax changes
It was an incredibly stupid idea pushed by foreign propaganda and complete morons. So, it seems this is one example of what happens when people do something incredibly stupid.
Dont underestimate the role straight up racism played in the brexit vote. It wasn't just foreign propaganda, and much of the propaganda was enabled by racism.
It was interesting, as a non-European, to see the explosion of anti-Eastern European racism that happened in the UK in the lead-up to and after the Brexit vote.
There were a bunch of anti-Polish posters and incidents of harassment and violence that occurred about the time period. Being anti-Polish in particular, at least for somewhere like the UK, seems so bizarre to me.
And those of us that weren't duped (and did actually vote) are stuck along for the ride, all the while knowing how preventable this whole mess was.
For starters, some of the people voting to leave didn't even know what the EU was, some voted simply because they wanted to spite David Cameron, and some thought it'd get rid of the "foreigners". All absolutely dumbfuck reasons to fuck over the country by voting leave.
Furthermore, a bunch of the remainers didn't even vote because they assumed we'd win, which is also a massively dumbfuck reason not to vote, as by doing so they effectively voted to leave instead.
To be slightly fair to them though, I'd too have a hard time imagining that there'd be so many people willing to vote so completely against their own interests based off almost solely off the words of two slimy rich bastards and a bus.
Should watch us here in the US. We always vote against our interests and it always turns to shite.
Not voting or voting without knowing what's being voted for are yet another thing we're #1 at.
What I found astonishing is that it only required a 50%+1 vote majority for something that important.
It only required that because it was a "non-binding, advisory" referendum.
I mean it was fairly obvious leading up to the vote that it wasn't just going to be taken as advisory, but there technically should have been another vote before Brexit formally happened.
Of course that wouldn't happen though, because the conservatives that wanted Brexit to happen knew they got lucky first time round, and would lose their lightning in a bottle of they'd put it out there a second time.
Exactly. The problem is not that the lie was convincing - the problem is that so many people wanted to believe the lie
the pieces of shit campaigning to leave played on people's hatred and it worked. frankly I'm disappointed and disgusted we had so many people like that in this country.
I remember UKIP putting up a billboard that was specifically meant to look like the Nazi's anti-Jewish immigrant propaganda. Remember that?
Indeed, but it still surprises me somehow that the consequences of that whole fiasco are so large
Stupid people get bad results. I don't feel sorry, especially because their departure was fueled by their dislike for us.
Do you feel sorry for the 48% of people who weren't "stupid" and voted to remain, yet still have to deal with this bollocks?
I mean that's hardly fair, given that in the past, constitutional changes weren't done on the basis of an advisory referendum with a tiny majority, and we weren't told prior that the outcome would result in Brexit.
If you're blaming the voters, you're letting the Conservative party get away with it. It is decidedly their fault.
we weren’t told prior that the outcome would result in Brexit.
Let's assume for a moment that what you say is accurate. It's just advisory. Not caring if the voters just give the government the "advice" to shoot the country in the foot also seems pretty dumb to me.
Also, between the referendum and actual Brexit there were TWO general elections. In 2019 the conservatives were reelected, with a stunning participation of 67%. You guys HAD to have woken up by then.
If you’re blaming the voters, you’re letting the Conservative party get away with it.
No, I'm not. But if you live in a democracy, you share the responsibility for decisions that are made in your name. And the only way they are not made in your name is if you vote against them. You don't get out of that by claiming "they lied" when those lies at the time were constantly debunked in basically all of the media if you just bothered to look.
Let's assume for a moment that what you say is accurate
Let's not. Instead of assuming, we can agree that the referendum being advisory is a matter of fact. I can provide thousands of sources for this if you are unsure.
between the referendum and actual Brexit there were TWO general elections.
Two points here. Firstly, an election is not a single issue referendum and the Conservatives winning an election is therefore not equivalent to the voters agreeing on Brexit.
Secondly, in both of these elections the majority of voters voted for anti-Brexit parties. So, if we were to take the elections as referenda, (which, again, we can't) the results would show that the UK voted subsequently against Brexit. Twice.
As for your last paragraph, the fact that "they lied" (not sure why this is in quote marks: they did) does matter. It's not reasonable to expect that the whole populace will have the time, inclination, ability or education to be able to understand the full picture and determine which parts of what they're being told are true and which are lies. This is partly why we elect and pay representatives. A lot of lies were told, some in completely novel ways and some in more traditional ways, but enough to at least confuse the average Joe. Why would you lay the blame at the door of people who made a decision based on the best information that was available to them when that information was bogus?
those lies at the time were constantly debunked in basically all of the media if you just bothered to look.
Outright incorrect here. The majority of the media was pro - brexit in the UK. Owned as it is by disaster capitalists and paid-up Tory supporters. At the very least, the message from the media as a whole was incoherent. I believe it's fair to say that large parts of the mass media embarked on a targeted misinformation campaign for the very purpose of muddying the waters and convincing people to vote against their own interests.
I'm not sure why you overlook all of this. Perhaps you just didn't know. Perhaps you're a Tory supporter. Perhaps you just like nice, neat black-and-white answers. But by doing so, you're blaming a lot of innocent people and letting a lot of guilty ones off without scrutiny. You're literally making it worse.
Let’s not.
"Let's assume" in this case means "I'll take your word for it because it's really not important to my point."
Firstly, an election is not a single issue referendum and the Conservatives winning an election is therefore not equivalent to the voters agreeing on Brexit.
I would agree in 9 out of 10 cases, this is the tenth. By that time there was already major controversy about possibly canceling Brexit or having a second referendum, the many difficult issues of the separation and the negotiations were obvious and Johnson was specifically pushing for an early election to gain more leverage for his hard-line position. The matter at hand was one that would change Britain's position in the world for a long time, reversing it could not be easily done and it was basically live or death for parts of your economy. This was apparent, as some companies were already in the process of leaving for other EU countries.
All this considered, nobody who wanted the UK to remain could reasonably justify staying home. Remember, I'm not even talking about conservative voters, the issue is 30% not even showing up.
Secondly, in both of these elections the majority of voters voted for anti-Brexit parties.
Yes. "Winner takes all" is fucked up. But that's not my point. 30% stayed home. That's what my first comment was about that you are answering.
so how can I “share the responsibility for decisions that are made in [my] name”, when I did everything in my power to stop it?
See the second to last sentence from my last comment.
not sure why this is in quote marks: they did
Because it's quoting somebody else. Not every quotation mark is insinuating the content isn't true. Politicians lie or only tell certain parts of the truth without context all the time to promote their agenda. It sucks, but none of them have ever been jailed or otherwise punished for it, so as long as that is the case you have to expect it. And it's your job as a citizen to do at least some reading on important issues.
You didn't even have to get the whole picture. You just had to look outside, see the town square that was renovated and freshly paved with EU subsidies (example that my brother in law showed me when we visited - he continued with "they paid for it, now they can gtfo"), or the polish nurse taking care of your grandma 24h, and think for a second. That should have made people doubt.
Also, international news. The internet is a thing, and your mother language happens to be the modern lingua franca.
But by doing so, you’re blaming a lot of innocent people and letting a lot of guilty ones off without scrutiny. You’re literally making it worse.
If you read carefully, you'll notice that not once did I write anything to the effect of what the Tories and UKIP did wasn't bad. All I am saying is that everybody who didn't go out and vote remain had it coming. That includes everybody who didn't vote, and nobody can claim they didn't have access to at least hints about the magnitude of the consequences. The EU publicly told you in advance in pretty simple terms, multiple times. And common sense dictates that no club will ever let you keep the benefits without also sharing the costs (the whole "cherry picking" thing).
You seem unable to differentiate between "Alice did a bad thing" and "Bob is innocent of a different thing" (not the same, not correlated, I said one, not the other). That's sad, but please don't blame me for your false conclusions.
so how can I “share the responsibility for decisions that are made in [my] name”, when I did everything in my power to stop it?
And the only way they are not made in your name is if you vote against them.
They voted for it twice, and it won by an even larger margin the second time!
They deserve everything that has happened to them. The most infuriating part is that they'll never admit they were wrong.
What? There was only one referendum. What on Earth are you on about. You mean the undemocratically elected parliament?
Well, there was sort of a second, but that could best be described as Remain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_United_Kingdom_European_Communities_membership_referendum
Looking at approval polls in Eurobarometer, as I recall, British opinion on the EU tended to trend downwards after the Maastricht Treaty. So the public was kinda onboard with a looser organization, but not as much with a tighter.
Also, the referendum happened to rather unfortunately coincide with the European migrant crisis, so you had upset at immigration hitting a fever pitch right about the time the referendum was run, and some of the campaigning related to it (like taking back control of borders).
Can I just add that a lot of UK craft beer firms went bust because they were started by a bunch of trust-fund babies with sleeve tattoos and no experience and their beer was disgusting over-hopped SHITE
That would explain about 70% of this statistic
Some of us really like over hopped IPA's - almost all IPA's nowadays are more fruity/citrusy and it fucking sucks meng, I loved the taste of biting into a bitter leaf....
Hazy IPA is where I draw the limit. Imperial IPA is the litmus test to check if someone has shit taste
Do you have sources that directly contradict the article? Or are you just angry at new things
I love how nearly every nation is having a housing crisis. We all know what the true crisis is but even in "communist" China they refuse to acknowledge that greed and the accumulation of wealth in fewer and fewer hands is the problem. We're headed to the destruction of humanity as we know it. Such a dumb species. I only hope the bottom 90% of humanity realizes soon enough and restructures society that is equitable based on need followed by a distant accumulated wealth.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Kimi Karjalainen and his brother Marko poured their life savings into Bone Machine Brewing Co when it opened in Pocklington, East Yorkshire, in 2017 before moving to Hull, as part of the craft beer revolution that swept Britain.
Post-Brexit trading arrangements with European Union countries meant that Bone Machine’s craft beers needed to be accompanied by expensive and time-consuming paperwork.
Bone Machine is one of more than 100 small brewers that have been forced out of business in the past 18 months, hit by a combination of Brexit, the pandemic and the cost of living crisis and now threatened by changes to beer duty laws.
So while people were getting worse off, the multinational brewers were going to pubs, to free houses, and saying ‘we’ll give you cheap kegs, but we want control of all your lines’.”
Other issues affecting the industry have been the shortage of carbon dioxide following the early stages of the energy crisis, and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine which raised the cost of barley and hops.
Larger companies have been doing well, including Brewdog, the Camden Town Brewery and Beavertown, which the Grocer reported had seen supermarket sales rise by more than a quarter.
The original article contains 958 words, the summary contains 199 words. Saved 79%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
but kimi kimi kimi, you set up a business in the UK.... "heavily geared for export [to EU countries]" …. in 2017....?
There was no change in trade regulations until 2021. The UK government insisted all along that they would get "the best of both worlds" and "no friction". While there was a reduction in demand from the EU side, acknowledged by most pre-established businesses, if you started in 2017 you wouldn't have seen it.
Kimi was a mug for believing lies from the UK government, or hoping/betting that things wouldn't get as bad as they did. A softer, saner agreement achieving EEA-like status would have been fine for him, after all. But nope, we got our hard brexit...
I grew up several miles from Pocklington (the home of the business named in the article) and having any industry up there other than pig-farming would have been a welcome change. The British government forced this country into an idiotic referendum on a matter where very few people understood the consequences of the "Leave" decision, and then doubled down on their failed gamble by fucking up the post-Brexit negotiations.
Blaming entrepreneurs, who were simply trying to create a business & employ people, something that this government purports to support, for lacking the foresight to realise how incompetent and self-serving this government is, seems delusional.
Bro, every person with half a brain knew knew knew how stupid Brexit was, and knew knew knew the exact consequences of the referendum passed. To the fucking detail smart people fucking knew this, and everything that happened, was going to happen.
It's the fucking idiots, racists, basically trump maga equivalents in the UK who were too smooth-brained to understand complex shit who voted to leave. All of us with just a slight wrinkle (edit - a slight wrinkle in our brains, adding this because I'm sure you don't follow - end edit) knew this would happen, foresaw it happening, talked about how all this dumb shit would happen, but yet here we are.
Blame the propaganda machine that got the smoothies to vote to leave before you start throwing shade at people making fun of the idiots (I don't know if the person in the article is a brexiter or not, if not I feel for them, but they have their fellow countrymen to blame, not us commentators on the internet who are laughing at the leopards eating faces of the leopards eating faces party.
Entrepreneurs main task is to evaluate and use risk to enter a market for profit.
You would have to be pretty bad at risk management to watch the tory goverment self immolating at every turn for years and not think that that would affect the likely success of your buisness.
This is especially true if your buisness depended deeply on trade agreements that your local government just tore up very, very publically and then refused to renegotiate very, very publically.
Also P6 before they mention the cost of living crisis... I love craft beer but 10 quid a pint is tough to swallow when you're staying down an electricity bill that doubled in the last 12 months plus all your groceries went up by his knows how much
I'm happy enough to blame brexit but when it comes to discretionary purchases like craft beer i doubt it's even the main culprit... mind you I still drink it, but then I'm borgouis or something
10 quid a pint
That's either bathtub-sized batches (and all the work that means) or they're gouging. Rule of thumb if you can find it in supermarkets they're not brewing in bathtubs as supermarkets demand quite large minimum volumes.
Over here in Germany we have Störtebeker, they're not exactly a microbrewery but a (quite old, actually) small, independent, regional, brewery who for the longest time simply brewed their local Pils and maybe one or two other bog-standard things. Then they had a look at the market and came up with new recipes using all kinds of fancy methods and special yeasts and aroma hops and everything, leading to things like their Atlantic Ale, the missing link between Pils and IPA, for about 1.30€ per half litre bottle. That's about the same price range as big beer brands with TV ads, or a Budweiser (Czech of course).
Some pictures for a sense of scale. Sure that's way beyond the bathtub league but compared to actually big brewers it's tiny.
Occasionally they have actually expensive stuff but then you're looking at five times ice-distilled beer or such. Shouldn't be surprising that that's five times more expensive you're buying quite a bit less water.
If you want to brew at the bathtub scale, commercially, open a pub or probably better restaurant and do beer pairings.
And I wonder if old mate and the rest of his family voted leave or stay. I'm pretty short on sympathy for self inflicted damage nowadays
Other issues affecting the industry have been the shortage of carbon dioxide following the early stages of the energy crisis
My kneejerk reaction is that that's probably self-solving. Like, you only need so much food-grade carbon dioxide, so you only have so many facilities capturing it from power plants or whatever rather than just dumping it into the atmosphere. Makes no sense to increase capture if there's no demand. But if supply falls off, then it makes sense to capture from more sources of carbon dioxide.
googles
Huh. Apparently the brewing industry is actually a source of food-grade carbon dioxide, not a consumer.
https://www.linde-gas.com/en/products_and_supply/food_grade_gases/index.html
We supply food grade carbon dioxide (CO2) , nitrogen (N2), and oxygen (O2) along with other gases authorised for foodstuffs as individual gases in cylinders under high pressure as well as liquids in insulated tanks for subsequent mixing at the packaging machine and premixed.
Carbon dioxide is taken from natural wells or captured as a by-product of fermentation processes (wine, beer) or ammonia production.
Any bot makers want to make one to check for an archive.is paywall bypass?
About 25% of the population voted to leave.
Vote, people. Because if you don't, a minority might choose your future for you. You can avoid politics, but politics won't avoid you.
That’s what I always say too. Like, vote because if you don’t someone else will vote for you, and if you don’t and the elections don’t end the way you wanted then you have no right to complain.
Half the country didn't vote for this and about 3.5 million EU citizens living in the UK weren't allowed to vote (which was against EU regulations but nobody seems to care). So quit the "they asked for it" bullshit.
Not sure why that’s relevant unless you’re arguing that the referendum should have had an attendance threshold; which wouldn’t have happened, it was supposedly advisory…
"Supposedly" as though both sides weren't arguing that they'd force the result through if it landed in their favour.
As someone who did vote remain, people should have taken the referendum more seriously at the time. It was obvious leading up to the vote that it was always going to be taken as more than advisory by both sides.
I agree; I voted remain and took it seriously. The point of it being Advisory was that, when it turned out to be a really shit idea, that was the escape clause.
It wasn't advisory other than in a technical legal sense. The UK has no constitutional mechanism for binding referendums. Parliament could always ignore the public, because Parliament can do anything. Cameron just says "what you vote for is what we're gonna do", and you take that at face value.
If they'd wanted the analog of an advisory referendum, Cameron would have said "we will take this as input" or something like that.
I'll also add that, as someone in California, which places a larger-than-typical emphasis on (binding) referendums than most US states, I'd say that a large chunk of the absolute worst policies that I've seen have come from referendums.
That's not to say that I'd oppose their use in all cases, and given that Brexit was probably most analogous to an independence referendum, which is one of the few places where I do agree with referendums, it probably made sense.
But I would not favor expanding their use. The fundamental issue with direct democracy is that it's a lot less-costly to get a hundred or couple hundred people to really seriously look at and understand an issue to make an informed decision than it is tens of millions. A legislature is, I think, generally a better mechanism to use.
The only problem with that is the conservative party that took over wanted Brexit that to happen, so they were never going to pull that chute fir everyone else. They were just going to wait out the consequences on their piles of money.
30% of eligible voters didn't bother showing up --> they have to live with the consequences. Also, it's not 50% of the population that didn't vote for it, more like half of the 70% of eligible voters that decided to show up, making it 35%.
True, however Putin had his fingers in it as he did with the US election. France managed to avoid the fall out the same window or we would be in a heap of trouble.
I bet there have been some great craft beers out there - and I'm sorry for them and their businesses and that I never got to taste them - but the vast majority was disgusting. A beer should be a beer and not a fucking disgrace to nature.
I don't know about vast majority but I agree that a good solid chunk are gross. Sometimes just because you can doesn't mean you should. World doesn't need 20 different types of salty tangerine beer.
Just sounds like they had to fill out some extra paperwork but just decided to go out of business instead?? He could not being himself to fill out export paperwork.
So did you read the article?
Expensive and lengthy paperwork.
Higher export / import costs & tariffs
Covid
Exploding cost of living
Changed laws
Raised taxes
Yeah I did actually read it, he said export was 30 to 40% of his business and sending it all over the eu was a lot of paperwork. What he should have done is found a distributor one set of paperwork to get his product into the distribution warehouse then they handle the rest and deliver all over the eu to his existing clients for a fee. That was the only part he didn't wanna do the rest of the shit you listed affects all other industry in the UK it's not special to this guy or to beer. You raise your prices to cover costs.