If you want a miniature parable of British decline – a sort of Aesop’s fable for the age of the over-regulated state – allow me to present one and a half tonnes of perfectly good cod’s roe, currently trapped in a bureaucratic purgatory of our own making.
My company smokes fish. We have done so for more than a century, which is to say we have some experience in identifying what is edible and what is not. Last October, as we’ve done many times before, we purchased £20,000 worth of Icelandic cod’s roes via our long-standing Norwegian supplier. They were processed in an approved EU plant, stored in an approved EU warehouse, and transported to Britain on an approved EU lorry. No mystery. No irregularity. No risk.
The pallets arrived. We placed them in our freezers. We opened one of the 380 boxes to begin smoking it for customers. One. Enough to fill perhaps half a tray. At this stage, everything seemed routine – perfectly legal, perfectly normal.
The EU is not the villain here. We are
A few days later, the local Environmental Health officers descended with the alarmed solemnity usually reserved for nuclear accidents. The roes were, they said, ‘illegal’. Illegal? Not because they were unsafe – everyone agreed they were safe. Not because they came from a dubious source – we provided documentation proving the opposite. No, the crime was that a civil servant at the port had failed to notice the shipment lacked a CHED: a Common Health Entry Document.
And here’s the kicker: had the port officials done their job in the first place, the shipment could have been rejected immediately, returned to the supplier, and a CHED issued without a moment’s fuss. Instead, because the goods were allowed into the UK, every solution became far more complicated. Getting the fish out of the UK once it had been admitted – even when it was completely safe and perfectly documented – turned into a Kafkaesque nightmare. And because we had already opened a single box in good faith, before being told the products were ‘illegal’, the bureaucratic failure had now created an additional obstacle.
The proposed remedy? Destruction. Dispose of the entire lot. One and a half tonnes of high-quality food, responsibly sourced, destined – in theory – for landfill. This from departments that, on other days, deliver stern lectures on sustainability and food waste.
We offered laboratory testing. We provided all the accreditations the CHED would have confirmed. None of it mattered. Once the machine declares a product ‘illegal’, no amount of common sense can loosen the cogs.
The only alternative offered was to export the goods to the EU, then re-import them with the correct paperwork. That is, send them on a several-thousand-mile lorry journey simply to satisfy a procedural fiction that benefits nobody. Thousands of extra miles. More CO2. Shorter shelf life. Higher cost. All to satisfy a bureaucratic ritual that provides zero safety benefit and maximum stupidity.
Even that plan collapsed. The EU requires a certificate from the UK to accept the goods; the UK cannot issue a certificate for goods it has unilaterally deemed ‘illegal’; and so round and round we went, in a beautifully crafted loop worthy of Kafka, if Kafka had had a particular interest in smoked fish.
A shipping agent proposed a clever workaround: a ‘storage certificate’, which would allow the goods to be returned to the EU on the basis that they had merely been held in the UK. But this relied on the goods remaining unopened – which they had, apart from the solitary box we had opened before being told the products were ‘illegal’. That single opened box was enough to kill the entire solution. And, as the small print of EU regulation cheerfully explains, fish roes are not, for these purposes, even defined as ‘fishery products’. One almost has to admire the thoroughness.
At last – miraculously – the Norwegians stepped in and said: ‘Send it to us. We’ll sort it.’ Imagine that: Norway rescuing the UK from its own administrative incompetence. We intend to do just that, before having the roes shipped – again – back to Britain, where they started.
And here is the bitterest irony of all: private businesses like ours – the people who generate value, employ staff, and pay taxes – are the ones funding the salaries of the very officials whose principal achievement in this saga has been to make our work unnecessarily difficult. We pay the bill for our own obstruction.
Some will blame Brexit. But a country that cannot administer its borders, interpret its own rules sensibly, or distinguish between a public good and a bureaucratic ritual would struggle under any regime. The EU is not the villain here. We are.
This episode is not really about fish. It is about the triumph of process over purpose – a triumph so complete that it can turn safe, valuable food into contraband simply because someone forgot a form. Britain has not yet lost the ability to produce things. But it is increasingly losing the ability to allow others to produce them.
Meanwhile, our cod’s roe will take a scenic detour to Norway. And Britain’s regulatory culture will remain exactly where it is: stuck in the freezer, with the lid firmly shut.
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