Send for a Stiffening Order
This is the section which tells the ship's master to deliver an outward entry before any export goods are loaded - "other than goods for exportation loaded in accordance with a stiffening order issued by the proper officer.."
Isn't that grand? A stiffening order. As far as I can tell that means an order to strengthen the hull of a vessel or in this context permission to load goods as ballast in order to steady a ship.
Not only does it give you a direct link with your historic predecessors, it also writes the law of physics into the law of customs. You can't load export goods before you've delivered an entry, but you've got to load something to steady the ship.
I always thought that the electronic movement regulations for excise goods could have done with the insertion of a stiffening order. "Back in the war.." - well, back in the days when we were still part of the European Union - excise goods could be moved duty suspended to another EU state.
For many years they were covered by a piece of paper called the Accompanying Administrative Document or AAD. The UK warehousekeeper would send the goods out under an AAD, and the warehousekeeper at the other end would post it back to prove everything had been received.
Round about 2010, technology was brought in. Instead of sending a paper form out, the UK warehousekeeper would use the Electronic Movement and Control System to transmit an E-AAD. And the receiving warehousekeeper would send a receipt message back. No more paperwork! Apart from the paper copy that had to be given to whoever was transporting the goods so that they could show what they were carrying.
The only problem with the new system was that the law behind it created a paradox similar to the ones in Star Trek that always led to the computer blowing up when Captain Kirk asked it what colour the sky was at night. The trans-European committee of excise officers who drew up the EMCS system had a lot of experience in tobacco and alcohol - but they forgot that there were other duties - like cream tea duty.
One of the rules they put in place was that no excise goods could leave the excise warehouse until an E-AAD had been completed to show the quantity of goods being moved. Which was fine when you could pack cartons of fags or pallets of booze in the warehouse. Easy to calculate and complete the E-AAD before shifting the goods outside. But if you were moving a semi-liquid like clotted cream - or maybe one of those big plastic bags full of wine - you had to start pumping it out of the warehouse into the tanker before you could complete the E-AAD. And until you'd pumped the whole lot, you couldn't say for sure what the quantity was. So a proportion of excise movements were always going to be technically illegal under the new law.
Since it only affected a small (but valuable) proportion of movements, the EU committee was loathe to tinker with the regulations to reflect what was actually happening in the warehouse. But I'm sure some kind of stiffening order could have been inserted to bring things in line.
Of course now we're out of Europe and everything is a Customs Export. End of problem. But looking at how the current Government is always hoping technology will help them implement Brexit - and seeing all the problems they're having - I think the insertion of a few stiffening orders are well overdue.
