Blog ≫ 2020 ≫ Ha ha soy sauce-gate

What an embarrassment for that government dept claiming falling soy sauce as the biggest brexit achievement so far, and getting it mostly wrong. They claimed¹:

The bakers used a lot of soya sauce in the first challenge on #GBBO, so it's a good thing it will be made cheaper thanks to our trade deal with Japan

Then had to clarify²:

thanks to the UK-Japan trade deal, soya sauce will be cheaper than it otherwise would be under WTO terms, on which we would be trading with Japan from 1 Jan if we had not secured the UK-Japan trade deal.

Important points are:

• Soy sauce from Japan currently has no tarrif, because we're in the EU
• More of our soy sauce comes from Europe, only 16% comes from Japan
• After brexit we'll pay a tarrif on that
• The clarification seems to be knocking WTO terms, but that's all we'll have with Europe come January

As Mum points out, it's a tough job being Boris Johnson and I wouldn't want to do it so I should not criticise.

1. Removed old twitter.com/tradegovuk/status/1321187022883663873 link here.
2. Removed old twitter.com/tradegovuk/status/1321383581101469696 link here.

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Paul Clarke's weblog - I live in A small town, Kent. Married and father to two, I am a full-stack web developr, and I do javascript / nodejs, some ruby, python, php ect ect. I like pubs, running, eating, home-automation and other diy jiggery-pokery, history, genealogy, TV, squirrels, pirates, lego, + TIME TRAVEL.

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