Shadow Environment Secretary Victoria Atkins (Image: Andy Stenning/Daily Express)
This Government’s reputation in the countryside is shot. With rising by food prices for us all, a record number of farm closures last year and the Family Farm Tax Fiasco causing 14 months of angst for farming families, the incompetence and carelessness of this government is plain for all to see.
Since the election, every time British farmers have needed Labour to back them, they have been let down. In addition to the broken electoral promise concerning the Family Farm Tax, farm funding was withdrawn without warning last year, with no scheme to replace it, meaning thousands of farmers are struggling to survive. More red tape and costs are threatened in the Water White Paper and Labour’s addiction to higher taxes and business costs are, in part, causing rising food prices for us all.
This week, another attack on farming and the countryside has been uncovered. A trade report warns that Labour’s “reset” with the European Union could cost UK farms up to £810million, as well as lose 9.000 jobs in the rural economy and UK food and manufacturing industries. To put that enormous sum of money in context, it is nearly three times what the government expects to raise from the Family Farm Tax and amounts to roughly a third of the government’s annual farming budget.
This matters to us all because Labour’s shoddy deal will impact everyone’s food bills. In addition to the huge financial cost, Ministers have conceded that UK farmers will have to align with rules made in Brussels. This gives up one of the major Brexit benefits for domestic food production – the ability to set our own animal welfare standards, innovate and compete with foreign markets. In other words, the power to safeguard our own food security.
It means that higher animal welfare standards that Conservatives introduced since Brexit, such as banning the live export of livestock for slaughter, will be quietly ripped up.
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Reform are no better than Labour when it comes to these deals. They want to open the flood gates to foreign produce made to lower standards, to the detriment of UK consumers and farmers.
Take chlorinated chicken. In the UK, chickens are kept to very high standards and are only washed in water when killed because the processes are highly regulated and vetted. Nigel Farage has said he has no problem with chlorinated chicken from the US. The reason that the US wash chicken carcasses in chlorine is because their animal welfare regulations are much laxer: they cram chickens into much smaller cages which are not cleaned as regularly as we expect. This causes seeping sores on the chicken which then have to be rinsed out with chlorine to get rid of the bacteria.
Contrast this with Kemi Badenoch’s actions. When she was Secretary of State for Business and Trade, she had the backbone to stand up for British farmers by pausing the Canada trade deal to prevent the import of hormone-treated beef. Foreign farmers pump cattle with hormones so that they grow meat unnaturally quickly and we have long banned this practice in the UK.
Kemi stopped the trade deal because she understands that British farming must have a level playing field and these standards must be maintained.
The Conservatives have worked to win back the rural vote (Image: PA)
Another way in which this shoddy deal will favour foreign farmers over British farmers is in removing our competitive advantage in gene editing. British companies lead the world in their work in editing crop genes to prevent disease, eradicate pests and enable crops to survive drought or flooding. The EU will insist that this work is stopped for years until EU competitors catch up. In other words, British farmers will lose access to safe and vital crop protections that are currently approved in the UK but not authorised in the EU. And again, we will all pay the price of this in rising food prices.
In an increasingly volatile world, this government is playing Russian Roulette with our food security. As British farms close, Ministers seem to think that we can just import food from foreign farmers. The lessons of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine and its impact on international food supply chains and prices seems to have passed them by.
The Conservatives are urging this weak government to put the British national interest first in all of its negotiations with foreign powers. Do not negotiate away our animal welfare standards and competitive advantages for a foreign photo opportunity to distract from your failures at home. When the EU demands hundreds of millions of pounds from British farmers, don’t wilt like a floppy flower. Find some backbone, stand up for the British national interest and don’t sign this shoddy deal.