Comment by jakub_g
15 days ago
> Basically, you need to follow the tracking regularly until the package is tagged as lost or failed delivery, which is the cue to pay import fees.
> It’s the normal procedure to buy things from Europe since Brexit 2020. It’s actually quite shocking that Royal Mail still hasn’t updated their tracking system to be able to give a status “waiting on import fees to be paid online”. They had 6 years!
Wow.
Another Brexit bonus
It’s no coincidence those that championed Brexit are those that wanted a weaker Europe and weaker U.K.
That’s why the majority of tax payers were against it, the majority of educated people voted against it, the majority of working people voted against it, the majority of people alive today who voted voted against it
Yet we still got it.
Bloody poor people deciding for themselves what they want. Shouldn't get a vote unless you have a degree and property. If only they'd had the sense to listen to their betters.
And those poor people are objectively poorer because of Brexit. But as long as there's fewer foreigners coming in, then they're happy?
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Those poor people voted for something for which they were explicitly mislead. The results of Brexit have in no ways made their lives better.
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The elites made the mistake of actually putting political power in the hands of the British people for once.
Catastrophic error on their part, they won't do that again
It's never to late to rejoin, we've all learned a lot about foreign propaganda in the last decade.
Someone at Davos commented "It took you 7 years to negotiate your way out, it will take you 7 years to regret and then 7 years to negotiate back in".
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We need a whole generation to die off before that becomes likely.
In the mean time we should move closer when the opportunity rises.
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> "Paid the fee online, 20% VAT + a few pounds of handling fees ... It’s the normal procedure to buy things from Europe since Brexit 2020."
Why don't Amazon and other online retailers just charge you the UK VAT when you order and ship it "VAT paid", so it doesn't get held up at the border?
That's how it works in New Zealand. You pay New Zealand's GST when you place an order, not after it arrives. Any online retailer that ships over a certain volume of products to New Zealand is required to implement this.
This is exactly how it works in the UK for purchases worth £135 or less which are shipped directly from outside the UK. The retailer has to charge UK VAT as if it were a domestic sale at the point of sale, and there is then nothing to pay at customs so no hold-up for that. It's only consignments worth over £135 where it ends up being stopped for payment at import.
On top of that, Amazon and other large online retailers also have a huge distribution and warehouse network domestically in the UK already so for higher value items mostly they import themselves to their warehouses before sale and then sales are purely domestic.
> ”It's only consignments worth over £135 where it ends up being stopped for payment at import.”
But why only under £135? This seems like an arbitrary number, and a very low limit.
Strangely, if I order from Amazon UK to Finland in the EU, the VAT is already all included and it comes directly to me, no customs. Even for some third party sellers too.
It would be far better if we could get a government in who would use Brexit freedoms to scrap VAT and all the other sales and import taxes. They are an administrative nightmare and both unnecessary and ineffective. Stick to simpler taxes.
The problem is that we have one side who loves all things EU and the other that loves all things neoliberal - both of which are obsessed with sales taxes for some reason
VAT is not really all that complicated and accounts for around 15% of the UK tax take. Moving that to income tax would mean a substantial redistribution from working people to pensioners and incentivise moving more production abroad.
Import taxes are pretty complicated but unilaterally removing them would mean we would have nothing to negotiate tariff free access to foreign markets.
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Weird, I've never needed to do that - Royal Mail or whichever courier is handling it will either put a note for customs payment through the door (Royal Mail/Parcelforce), or send me an invoice via post or email (any of the other couriers).