[Locke]

Originally Posted by Itse

There's multiple reasons. Transport is a massive issue, and that's not just about truck drivers.

The UK was just not in any way prepared to have border controls, tariffs and bureaucracy added to their trade. This has caused massive jams at the borders, and also bureaucratic jams in, well, where ever they handle the red tape relating to imports and exports.

Those jams are quite expensive, as is the bureaucracy. If a truck sits at customs for a week you have to pay that trucker enough to cover that extra week or he won't do it, and you need to hire someone else to do that paperwork, and obviously you also have to pay the tariffs and fees. If the deal you're making doesn't have the profit margin to cover that, the trade just doesn't happen. For smaller companies it might not even be about the price, it's just that why sell to Bob if it's a massive hassle when you can just do business with literally everyone else with no hassle.

Also, you can't have perishable food items sit at the border for a week or more.

UK's trade deals were mostly negotiated when they were part of the EU, and all those deals also just blew up in the air.

Lack of a trade deal can mean many things, for example that you're last when there's a shortage of supply. If country X only has a finite number of test tubes for export and they've made a deal with the US and EU and China and Japan to sell them test tubes, and then there's a global pandemic and everyone wants to buy all the test tubes, then all the test tubes go there.

There's no amount of money UK can offer which would make it worthwhile for country X to go back on a signed international trade treaty, especially not with a major power.

A lot of all this is just incompetence and unpreparedness. The UK government basically made no preparations. They would have needed to re-establish whole government departments to handle trade now that EU isn't handling it for them, but they didn't, and AFAIK still haven't. I get the impression that their current government is just so ridiculously clueless. I'm not sure they understand trade enough to know how to fix their problems.

This is really the crux of the matter.

It is baffling to me that an island that should have desired free-trade more than anyone are the ones attempting to stop it.