The Brexit Revolution That Wasn’t
When the British government announced its latest “Brexit dividend” at the start of the year—a return to stamping a tiny crown onto our beer glasses—I was surprised. Mostly because I had not noticed that we’d stopped. Clearly I gave up pretending to like beer sometime before 2006, when the rules supposedly changed.
Except they didn’t. A close reading of the government press release revealed that in 2006, the European Union began to ask manufacturers to apply a common mark—“CE,” referring to the French acronym for “European conformity”—to certify that their glasses held a full pint. There was no requirement to drop the existing crown stamp. And now, in the glorious post-Brexit land of freedom, the government was merely “providing this guidance on how manufacturers can apply a crown symbol to beer glasses as a decorative mark on a voluntary basis.”
