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CHRISTMAS

Santa analysis: Claus and Europe feel Brexit pinch, as will UK’s Christmas

Will Santa still come to the UK if he faces tariffs and can’t move freely? And what about some of the goodies from the EU that Brits crave so much at Christmas?

Published: 20 December 2018 20:58 CET
Santa analysis: Claus and Europe feel Brexit pinch, as will UK's Christmas
Deposit Photos.

The Christmas spirit and festive relief will be much appreciated by those weighed under by the Brexit saga. But will Brexit in fact turn out to be the future grinch of British Christmases?

Santa could face logistics and supply chain issues in the UK if the country does eventually leave the EU with no deal. Santa and his reindeer could face long queues at Calais or find they don't have the right to enter British airspace.

Santa would then either have to set up a UK subsidiary or avoid delivering too many fresh cakes, treats or presents that could spoil.

EU gifts could suddenly face heavy tariffs, potentially preventing the red-cloaked, large and bearded Nordic man from delivering millions of presents across the British Isles.

The British government has also promised that Brexit will mean a tougher approach on immigration, although it’s unclear whether the UK would adopt the ‘Norway model’ and ban Swedish reindeer from entering the country. Santa might then not be coming to town.

Reindeer in Norway. File photo: AFP Photo/NORWEGIAN PUBLIC ROADS ADMINISTRATION/Kari Karstensen.

Turkey, champagne, port wine and sweet Italian cake are all linked to the spirit of Xmas – and to the EU.

Some British festive habits even crossed the Channel from Europe. In 1841, Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband, allegedly brought a Christmas tree from Germany to the UK, importing a tradition that has found its way into every British living room ever since. Martin Luther is apparently credited with having invented the Christmas tree.

It might have originally been an import from Europe, but higher costs for Polish and Danish trees to reach British shores meant UK-based growers were hailing Brexit as a victory for domestic-grown trees in 2017, according to a report in Horticulture Week.

British Christmas turkeys rely distinctly on EU labour. Some 90 percent of seasonal workers, who help breed and slaughter turkeys in the UK, are from Eastern Europe – mainly Poland, Romania and Hungary, according to a report in the Financial Times. 

READ ALSO: A big, fat Italian Christmas: how Italy does it bigger and better

“We wouldn’t be in business without migrant workers and we won’t be in business in the future without them,” MD of a turkey company Paul Kelly, also chairman of the British Turkey Federation, told British daily Metro. 

Polish workers are increasingly turning their back on the UK and instead seeking similar work in the Netherlands or Germany, states that report. 

Brits love a Christmas toast with champagne too, a fact confirmed by the United Kingdom’s position as the former leading consumer of the French sparkling wine in the world. 

Yet the head of the Union of Champagne Houses (UCH), which includes brands such as Moet & Chandon, said already at Christmas last year that the USA had dethroned the UK as the largest bubbly consuming nation. Brits are increasingly opting for cheaper alternatives.  And it isn’t just champagne that Brexit has in its sights. The price of a bottle of port wine, a Christmas favourite with mince pies, will rise to offset the extra costs Brexit entails.

READ ALSO: #SwedishChristmas: The festive Swedish songs just for adults

“We will have to gradually raise our prices in the coming years to cover losses,” Adrian Bridge, president of Fladgate Partnership – which owns leading port brands such as Taylor’s and Fonseca, told Forbes’ Portuguese-language outlet Forbes.pt, while discussing Brexit. Sales to the UK represent 30 percent of the company’s annual turnover, claims the Forbes report.

A slice of panettone cake is also popular in Britain. The United Kingdom is the third largest consumer of all Italian Christmas cake exports. Nearly 10 per cent of all panettone and pandoro cake exports from Italy go to the UK, according to Confartigianato, an Italian growers union which has warned that a no-deal Brexit could add substantial costs for its members who export heavily to the UK. 

Italian companies generated more than €43,2 million in sales in the UK during the festive period in 2016, accounting for 11.1 percent of all total exports in the sector, reported Confartigianato, a lobby group of Italian manufacturing firms.

Bonus viewing: BBC Newsnight's border-to-border (Muff to Dover) road trip across the UK while discussing Brexit tries to feel the pulse of the British public on Theresa May's Brexit deal before Christmas 2018.   

READ ALSO: The food and drink you need for an Italian Christmas feast

READ ALSO: The story behind France's 'little saints' of Christmas

READ ALSO: 12 weird and wonderful Christmas traditions celebrated across Spain

READ ALSO: Your essential guide for doing Christmas just like a German

 

 

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GIBRALTAR

Why has Gibraltar still not reached a Brexit deal with Spain?

With yet another round of Spain-UK negotiations set to begin more than eight years since the Brexit referendum, Gibraltar is still without a deal and a November deadline looms over any treaty. Why has it proven so hard to break the deadlock?

Published: 17 September 2024 13:38 CEST
Why has Gibraltar still not reached a Brexit deal with Spain?

On Thursday September 19th, Spain and the UK resume talks on Gibraltar’s post-Brexit status, and has been the case since 2016, uncertainty is still the prevailing feeling.

The British Foreign Secretary David Lammy recently received his Spanish counterpart, José Manuel Albares in London. Both did their diplomatic duties and talked up the prospects of a deal, with Lammy stating he hoped for an agreement that would ensure greater “prosperity and security for the people of Gibraltar.”

Albares, for his part, understandably centred any hypothetical deal on a “shared prosperity between Gibraltar and the 300,000 Andalusians connected every day in their normal lives”.

READ ALSO: Gibraltar demands Spain return stolen concrete block in new diplomatic spat

Though Lammy and Albares discussed the Rock, no formal negotiations or deal can be struck without EU oversight, so the meeting also included discussion of bilateral issues and international concerns such as the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.

The meeting between the two Ministers was therefore a preamble to yet more formal treaty negotiations in Brussels on Thursday. Since Brexit came into effect at the end of 2020, Gibraltar has essentially existed in legal limbo with no formal treaty.

Border controls have been fudged ever since, leaving locals and Spaniards across the border faced with inconsistent rules and forcing travellers to find creative ways to bypass rules and get over ‘La Línea’. 

Why hasn’t a deal been reached?

So why all the meetings and pre-meetings and endless rounds of negotiations? How is it possible that Gibraltar is still without a Brexit deal all these years later?

A recent piece in El País by Rafa de Miguel, the daily’s UK and Ireland correspondent, perhaps put it best: “The amount of warm words in any political statement is inversely proportional to the progress in the negotiations.”

The reality is that, however many handshakes and photo opportunities and positive attitudes expressed between Spain and the UK on a bilateral level, these are ultimately irrelevant as nothing can be signed without the EU’s approval. 

This is further complicated by the fact that this makes any deal dependent on four way negotiations between Spain, the UK, the EU, and Gibraltar.

Each of these parties has their own individual set of needs, preferences and motivations. The EU won’t want to be seen to give Gibraltar, and by extension the UK, any special treatment for fear of emboldening other member states who desire bespoke arrangements when it comes to border controls and customs checks.

In light of Germany recently reimplementing land border checks, something some say is a direct violation of Schengen rules, this will be especially sensitive in these latest rounds of negotiations. 

Spain has long made territorial claims on Gibraltar dating back to the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, when the overseas territory was first ceded to the UK, and will want to come out of negotiations with something that can be perceived as a political victory, likely an increased Spanish role in border patrols.

Fabian Picardo, Gibraltar’s Chief Minister, has ruled this out definitively over the last few years, citing concerns about British sovereignty.

The UK government in London will also have worries about British sovereignty, but will balance this with the knowledge that Gibraltar negotiations are also an opportunity to reset relations with Europe more widely, something the new Starmer government has repeatedly stated since coming into power.

READ ALSO: ‘It’s time to reset Britain’s relations with Europe’, says UK foreign secretary

Some reports, however, suggest that despite the positive musings coming from London, negotiations have stalled and that Lammy has no intention of signing anything that would deviate from Gibraltar’s needs and concerns.

Political tensions were increased recently when Gibraltar demanded Spanish far-right party Vox return a concrete block stolen from British waters, and the Euro 2024 winning Spanish football team made international headlines when it celebrating by singing ‘Gibraltar es Español’ (Gibraltar is Spanish).

READ ALSO: ‘Gibraltar is Spanish!’: How Spain celebrated Euro 2024 heroes

Despite wanting to improve relations with the EU, Lammy is expected to reiterate the Labour government’s unwavering commitment to the “double lock” on sovereignty, sources told El País.

Perhaps most pressingly, however, is the fact that these new negotiations now have a deadline: the enforcement of new Schengen Area border rules come into force on November 10th and a treaty must be finalised before then. 

READ MORE: Hard border? What we know so far about new Gibraltar-Spain checks

Schengen Zone rules mean that there are two major outstanding points in treaty negotiations: firstly, the sore point of Spanish border guards on British soil, something Gibraltar rejects outright, and also the question of who would run Gibraltar’s airport, which is located on the isthmus between Spain and the British territory, an area Madrid claims was never included in Treaty of Utrecht.

The most contested aspect of negotiations is Madrid’s demand that Spanish agents should be allowed to carry out checks on passengers arriving at Gibraltar airport and that they should be armed and in uniform.

For many Llanitos (Gibraltar locals) this is an intolerable idea and one Picardo rejects outright: “There will be no Spanish boots on the ground,” he has said repeatedly.

On the other hand, Spain argues that no specific protocol can be designed for Gibraltar and that if it wants to join the border-free European area, it must accept Schengen rules.

Spanish boots on British soil is a particularly visceral point for many Gibraltarians of a certain age. In June 1969, Spanish dictator Francisco Franco closed the border gate between Gibraltar and La Línea de la Concepción, cutting the tiny overseas territory off from the world, separating Spanish-British families and forcing Gibraltar to source food from elsewhere on the planet. 

It was eventually reopened in December in 1982 but those 13 years have taken deep root in Gibraltar’s historical memory and is now embedded into the Llanito collective imagination and identity.

For many on ‘The Rock’, the idea of Spanish border guards on British soil, whether it be in the airport or elsewhere, is simply unacceptable under any circumstances. 

Tax could also prove to be a sticking point. Gibraltar has no VAT, but Madrid has argued that if it wants to benefit from fluid border movement, its tax rules must be brought into line with EU rules.

Of course, there’s also both the domestic and international geopolitical contexts to consider here too. All parties – Spain, the UK, Gibraltar and the EU – have been distracted by other events in recent years.

Spain has been preoccupied by political tension, snap elections and the Catalan amnesty, while Britain suffered the almost cartoonish political instability of the outgoing Conservative government and treaty talks were postponed after the general election in July.

Added to this is the fact that the mediating party, the EU, has had its hands full with the war in Ukraine and surging far-right parties across member states, a trend that interestingly both the UK and Spain buck as the only major European states with centre-left governments.

Talks resume on Thursday September 19th, over 8 years since the Brexit referendum.

In British politics, the UK’s exit from the EU now seems strangely absent from debate, as though the issue is over and the country has finally begun to move on — but for Gibraltarians and the thousands of Spaniards who cross the border and work there everyday, Brexit is still an open-ended question.

READ ALSO: ‘Starting now’: New UK govt wastes no time in Gibraltar post-Brexit talks with Spain

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