Be careful what you tweet. I provoked online consternation this week with a picture of empty shelves in a Marks and Spencer food shop in Paris:
The great M and S Post-Brexit sandwich famine of 2021. Sign in the Marks and Spencer at Porte Maillot in Paris today. "Because of new govt regulations on trade between the UK and France , we received no shipments from the UK today." pic.twitter.com/3ngJpR7O50
— John Lichfield (@john_lichfield) January 4, 2021
Within a few minutes, my timeline was filled with wails of despair from British expats in Paris — and also from many Parisians. This is taking Brexit too far, they protested. Who cares if Paris is the world’s self-appointed culinary capital (when the restaurants are open at least)? How can we be expected to survive without daily supplies of bacon, lettuce and tomato or egg mayonnaise sandwiches? Or crumpets? Or scones? Or chicken tikka massala? Or Wiltshire sausages? Or strawberry trifle?
Four days later, food shipments to the Marks and Spencer outlets in Paris — and Lille and Dublin and Prague – have still not been fully restored. The M&S franchised food store at Porte Maillot in western Paris has been reduced to filling its refrigerated cabinets with cut-price bunches of kale. Shades of the Soviet Union circa 1974. Other stores have closed temporarily.
The Spectator and the Daily Express have tee-heed about Brexit-related “food shortages in France”. Here is proof, they suggest mischieviously, that Brexit is a problem for the French and for the rest of the EU, not for the UK.
Well, not really. France, as far as I can establish, is not facing starvation. There is plenty of camembert and paté de foie and boeuf bourguignon to go around. Only a tiny percentage of French people, and a few thousand British migrants, are concerned by the prospect of a collapse in the easy availability of British food delicacies in a few French cities.
The problems for M&S are in fact a microcosm of wider problems for UK PLC as it struggles to adjust to a new, less open relationship with its biggest, and nearest, trading partner.
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