DH and his Brexit cupboard

[Anymom]

Dh has converted two of our kitchen units into his Brexit cupboard! He has filled them up with all sorts of tinned delacacies including different beans, chilli and dogs (hot!)
He's also stockpiled toilet rolls, medicines, cleaning products etc. It's all stashed away in his new Brexit cupboard, that we have been warned not to touch! I darent tell him that the dc have already been in there hunting for chocolate. They were disappointed to find numerous bags of rice and pasta but alas no chocolate. Seems he has got his priorities mixed up! 😁
AIBU to think this is unnecessary and over the top? I need help to convince him as he talking about stockpiling and filling up the freezer and I'm dreading what concoctions I will find in there! All joking aside, it is just Dh panicking isn't it? We don't really need to be stockpiling food in one of the richest countries of the world, do we?

Pouty no it comes from even further afield I think you will find, and a funny thing being an island and all that, it still has to get through customs

A lot of what comes from other countries comes across Europe. Whilst we are in the EU we benefit from their trade deals. Leave with no deal and we are on our own and can be held to ransom by everyone. We’re a tiny market. Why would anyone do us any favours?

I sometimes wonder if TM sleeps at night considering the job she’s got.

She doesn't. They just switch her off.

*We’re a tiny market. Why would anyone do us any favours?

We're also desperate because we're up against a deadline of our own making that bothers nobody else. It's an incredibly weak negotiating position.

I've got a stockpile mainly for Brexit but also in case of heavy snow/zombie apocalypse. It's mainly things I buy anyway like pasta, rice, tuna and tomatoes but I do also have 24l of bottled water to last us a week, candles, matches, long life milk, gas for camping stove and tinned veg that i will hopefully never need and can donate a couple of months before best before date.

My husband humours me.

So far mine has two bags of dry cat food, 4 boxes of Felix AGAIL sachets, 3 packets of Dreamies (technically stolen from her Christmas present), a few packs of the Webbox cat sticks and a few bags of cat litter.

Priorities.

certainly explains the 72 Andrex rolls in the hallway....

I’ve got a 150 litres of diesel and a shotgun.
We can start trading about mid April I reckon!

How odd

in true Dad's Army style we will have 'prepared' for the worst only for it to be like the Minnelium Bug.. It will mean fuck all.

The Millenium bug had experts working on it for years so nothing catastrophic would actually happen.

Sadly experts weren't wanted anywhere near Brexit negotiations.

Yeah they should stock up, best buy an extra freezer as well.

TBH, I'm just place marking to see how many will stand by their convictions over the next few year and not name change.

I presume TM thinks that a prospect of no deal will scare the eu into giving uk a more favourable deal. I get that negotiations are sometimes about who caves in first at the prospect of worse case scenario for both. It’s like threatening your spouse to leave if they don’t submit to your (reasonable?) demands.
I’d like to think there’s more work going on in the background than we, the general public, are told about. I hope a week before brexit we will be told that a new amazing compromise has been reached. But somehow that seems to be a slim hope.
Until that happens im stockpiling.

I would love to see TM as this awesome woman who was tough and got us through some very though times into a thriving economy.
On a different note, what kind of a voluntary union EU is if you cannot leave unless committing an economical suicide and risking civil unrest? Can any country ever break away without economic suicide and civil unrest?

only for it to be like the Minnelium Bug.. It will mean fuck all.

I'm assuming you mean the millennium bug. I can't quite believe I'm saying this again - the reason nothing (much) crashed is because people worked very hard to ensure it didn't. Sadly, this does not appear to be the case with Brexit.

Can any country ever break away without economic suicide and civil unrest?

Yes, of course they can. But they need to prepare for it and recognise how integrated their systems are within the EU. They need to negotiate properly, not set an impossible clock running and then expect everybody else to make up for their base incompetence. They need to realise how long trade deals take to negotiate. They need those in charge to have moved beyond "Dover to Calais, I didn't realise it was important". In short, they need leaders who aren't donkeys.

The people that appear in the public eye working hard for brexit are not those that will be directly affected by it- do you really think the upper class will struggle with their supplies? Do you think their kid’s (private) education and future job markets will be affected? I don’t think so.

@Scandaloso

Is it too late to ring these people now?

I think I fancy your dh

You're all crackers ( ooh have you got those in yr panic cupboards?!)

@NowYouHaveDoneIt

Crackers!!

Will cheese freeze? Need that on there too. -frets--

Yes, Belenus, but we don’t seem to have the competent negotiators then. Or perhaps, rather miguidedly, the negotiators we do have are going with the ‘if i stomp my feet hard enough the other side will back down’ approach. Which might not work for our benefit at all.

The broader question here is though, can anyone even abandon this union without committing an economical etc suicide, because if they cannot then at what point does the will of a soveregn country cease to exist? Unions (voluntary or forced) don’t last forever so what happens when they break apart? Is there a way to break away from this union that doesn’t inflict sufferrring on it’s citizens?

I have crackers in my Brexit cupboard. And parmesan in the freezer. I could not bear to run out of parmesan.

I'm not in the UK but I do live somewhere with irregular supply chains. Forget meal planning - you have to work with what you can actually get in the shops that day / week

I've got quite good at always making sure that we have at least two of staple things like tinned tomatoes, buying a replacement when one is used so that if we have a couple of weeks where they aren't available we are OK. And rotating the cupboard so that we don't just put new tins into the front and push old stuff to the back to fester...

I actually do have crackers in my stash only because we didn't eat them at Christmas.

I've emigrated since Brexit, but if I'd stick around I'd do some prepping. I still think a No Deal scenario is very unlikely, but while it remains on the table, it's sensible (if likely ultimately unnecessary) to be prepared.

It will do you no harm. You never know what's coming

"We don't really need to be stockpiling food in one of the richest countries of the world, do we?" Money isn't the issue really.

I have said on other brexit/stockpiling threads I have friends who work in retail buying (as in they manage what is bought on to supply major supermarkets) and at ports dealing with items being imported and exported - they are stockpiling personally. That tells me all I need to know!

I also live in rural west Scotland, last year when we were affected just by the WEATHER (beast from the east) local supermarkets very quickly ran out of basics (bread, milk, cheese, veg) and stocks weren't properly back to normal for several weeks (iirc it was about 6 weeks until it was back to how it was before the bad weather hit) we were completely snowed in for 4 days as in my dd physically couldn't get to work - which is within walking distance - without risking a serious fall, even her employers accepted that and closed the premises.

And that was "just" 3 weeks of "bad weather".

The govt themselves are doing dry runs of potential traffic jams, bulk buying fridges & freezers to store food & medicines, clearing old govt buildings of clutter to provide storage...

They're also preparing police & armed forces to deal with civil unrest.

So yes, I really do think it's a sensible thing to do.

Don't buy anything you wouldn't normally use (possible exceptions of things like candles, wind up torches etc) and at best if it is all a "panic over nothing" or if our politicians finally get their bloody act together and sort something reasonable then you don't need to buy those items for a while and have a cheaper shopping bill, at worst you're prepared, you're not having to fight people panic buying in the shops or simply not being able to get basics at all or having to pay inflated prices even if there is availability.

Win win.

There's ALREADY due to this govts policies not even related to bloody brexit, people LITERALLY starving to death, diseases directly relating to malnutrition sharply increasing, drs are seeing patients with conditions that we think of as belonging to the depression era - rickets etc.

Brexit if it isn't sorted damn soon will add to these difficulties.

I'm disabled & on benefits so not a lot of spare cash but even I've bought a few of those collapsing crates & put in my room and I've been getting just a few extras in my grocery shop each week. Long life food & drink but also other items that are crucial for us. I HOPE I won't need it and I'll just have a small grocery bill in April...but if we do need it I think we'll be glad of it.

"Surely we should be stockpiling things we won't get after the split from Europe. Wine, nice cheeses, belgian chocolates, Iberian ham, truffles, real italian pasta, maybe nutella, macarons.
I would be most in favour of making such a cupboard even if we dont Brexit after all." It's not just products we immediately think of as "European" many "British" products need eu ingredients, products from outside the Eu often come to the uk via the eu.

There's been a few people referencing "in the war" not only did the uk govt spend a good amount of time preparing for that as far as possible even before war was declared and still rationing was necessary quite early on and black marketeers were profiting. There's also a rose tinted view that "we all pulled together" when actually crime rates including looting of bombed out homes while the residents were dying was common - remember all the young fit men were away fighting in the war, they weren't home policing the streets that was left to older less fit men.

It's utterly appalling & irresponsible they've let it get to this! Regardless of which side of the debate you are they've let everyone down.

My main worry (that I can't get a sodding answer on!) is prescription meds. Dd and I are both on painkillers that are controlled drugs so there's restrictions on prescribing levels, we don't need them daily but most weeks. I'm also on a medication that it's physically DANGEROUS to stop taking (affects heart) that also has restrictions. Hoping to get an answer on that one this week. I've loved ones on cancer & diabetes medication that I'm worried about too. They too are saying they're not getting answers to their concerns.

"This is real, we are about to crash out of the EU with no deal because our political class have been collective fools for 40 years." I'm genuinely concerned if there isn't a resolution and things back to normal for people by summer and if we get another hot one tempers will flare!

"We will just have to eat food sourced locally" there isn't nearly enough. If may et al had ANY sense at all they'd have sorted farming & manufacturing & storage 2 years ago! It's way too late to do much in that way now.

"in true Dad's Army style we will have 'prepared' for the worst only for it to be like the Minnelium Bug.. It will mean fuck all" brexit prep bingo - I call house!

I worked for a telecoms organisation in the 18 months before Millenium, even when I started they'd already been doing a LOT of work to deal with the problem - it did not just "magically" not happen.