About the author<\/p>\n
![\"Matt](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Matt-Mountain-circle-image.png\")
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Matthew Mountain<\/strong><\/p>\n Matthew Mountain is a director of Mountain Farms, based in Lincolnshire.<\/p>\n Here he rues the impact of Brexit and the consequences of a shrinking economy.<\/p>\n The result? A policy vacuum filled with half-truths, performative outrage, and influencers playing to the algorithm instead of the evidence.<\/p>\n Yes, that includes \u201cag influencers\u201d\u2026<\/p>\n Before Brexit,\u00a0more than 60% of UK agricultural exports went to the EU, tariff-free. <\/p>\n We had stable access to a single regulatory framework that gave UK food producers the confidence to invest.<\/p>\n In turn, strict import rules kept chlorinated chicken, hormone-treated beef, and crops grown with banned chemicals like paraquat and fipronil off our shelves.<\/p>\n That deal has gone. And in its place? A patchwork of \u201copportunities\u201d that mostly benefit large importers and the political optics of sovereignty.<\/p>\n New trade deals now undercut British farmers with cheaper imports grown under conditions we could never legally match.<\/p>\n Ricardo\u2019s law of comparative advantage \u2014 deliberately misappropriated by Tufton Street \u2014 only works when the rules are equivalent. And they\u2019re not.<\/p>\n Worse, many who led the charge for Brexit have pivoted without pause.<\/p>\n Some now appear on GB News decrying the unfairness of being undercut \u2014 ignoring their role in creating the very conditions they now condemn.<\/p>\n That the same network is owned by Paul Marshall \u2014 whose Legatum Institute helped sell the myth of a deregulated agrarian utopia \u2014 seems not to trouble them.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, farmers who raise uncomfortable truths risk isolation.<\/p>\n The damage began with Brexit \u2014 but it hasn\u2019t ended there.<\/p>\n Labour doesn\u2019t need to say it hates farmers. Its fiscal plans speak clearly enough.<\/p>\n Agriculture is simply the next sector to be \u201cmanaged down,\u201d as forewarned by agricultural economists such as Sean Rickard.<\/p>\n But this isn\u2019t just ideological punishment. It is one of the bills for Brexit \u2014 and the plans for agricultural property relief (APR) is one of the handmaidens of that failure.<\/p>\n Would APR be in the Treasury\u2019s crosshairs if we were still inside the single market and customs union? Of course not.<\/p>\n The Office for Budget Responsibility estimates Brexit will shrink UK productivity by 4% and trade by 15% \u2014 wiping \u00a390bn\/year off the economy.<\/p>\n In that context, Labour\u2019s planned APR cap \u2014 expected to raise \u00a3500m annually by 2027, rising to \u00a32bn by 2030 \u2014 isn\u2019t some bold new policy. It\u2019s fiscal triage for a self-inflicted wound.<\/p>\n So why do many of the same farmers who cheered Brexit now protest the consequences, but stay silent on the cause?<\/p>\n That dissonance isn\u2019t just frustrating \u2013 it\u2019s fatal.<\/p>\n If we\u2019re serious about defending British farming, we need to stop defending a fantasy.<\/p>\n The Tories built Brexit. Labour whipped it. Now Labour owns it \u2014 and shows no intention of reversing course.<\/p>\n They could announce a path to rejoin tomorrow. They won\u2019t.<\/p>\n Brexit is now a cross-party silence project \u2014 and it\u2019s farming that pays the price.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the years since Brexit, British agriculture has become caught in a peculiar double bind. 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