The EU doesn’t care about UK’s food safety… just the £40bn we spend post-Brexit importing everything from beef to butter
ONCE they accepted that Brexit was going to happen, Eurocrats had one overriding aim.
They wanted to hang on to Britain as a market for their exporters and especially for their farmers.
The UK buys around £40billion of EU food exports each year — a quarter of everything Europe sells to the rest of the world.
We take twice as much as the EU’s next biggest customer the US, and four times as much as the one after that, China.
For Europe, Britain is a treasure island. As long as we are not free to source our food from elsewhere, we will buy all the Irish beef, Danish butter and German pork the EU can sell us.
To keep things that way, Brussels must ensure that we don’t diverge from its food standards.
Otherwise, British consumers might start buying Canadian or Australian rather than French or Irish beef. (Yes, we eat plenty of British beef, too, but we still import much of what we consume.)
This EU demand lies behind most of the rows we had after Brexit.
Captive market
The nonsense about the Irish border, the scare stories about “chlorinated chicken” and “hormone-treated beef”, the refusal to discuss anything else until we had promised not to diverge on food standards in Northern Ireland — they were all really about keeping the UK as a captive market.
Now Labour is reported to have capitulated to the EU’s key demand.
It has promised to amend our food safety laws so as to follow whatever Brussels might decree in the future.
That is what EU officials mean by “dynamic alignment”.
It is important to understand what a vast and pointless concession this is.
There is nothing wrong with agreeing to follow EU rules on a case-by-case basis when we think that doing so is cheaper or more convenient.
Britain is making an open-ended commitment to shadow whatever the EU might choose to do.
Hannan
Equally, we could simply declare that both British and EU standards will apply on our territory.
But that is not what is happening here.
Britain is making an open-ended commitment to shadow whatever the EU might choose to do.
We are, in other words, handing our regulations to officials who are beyond our control, officials who won’t even have to pretend to have us in mind when they set their rules.
It is a massive climbdown. Ever since the Brexit vote, we have been holding out for a mutual recognition deal with the EU.
Food passed as fit here should be recognised there, and vice versa.
There is nothing unreasonable or unusual about mutual recognition.
No one in Brussels argues that British food is less safe than Continental food. Nor do they claim that our animal welfare standards are lower.
On the contrary, we ban several practices that are widespread in Europe: rearing pigs in sow-stalls, for example.
Indeed, the EU has a mutual recognition deal with New Zealand, whose standards — though again perfectly safe — diverge much more from its own than ours do.
No, this has nothing to do with food safety and everything to do with domination.
By keeping us as a captive market — above all for Irish beef and dairy farmers, but also for French, Spanish, Dutch and German exporters — the EU makes us a far less attractive trading partner for the rest of the world.
My sense is that Labour will manage to scrape together some kind of trade deal with the US.
But it will be much thinner than it might have been because of our refusal to talk about food.
Having spent a few days meeting officials in Washington last week, I think there will be a trade deal focused heavily on tech and AI.
Don’t get me wrong, this is all to the good, and Labour will deserve credit if we can come away with a zero-tariffs agreement.
What serious country contracts out its laws to foreign officials? When did we become so diminished as a people?
Hannan
But an American ask throughout — not just an American, but also a Canadian, Indian, Australian and South American ask — is that we follow the global science on food regulations instead of keeping protectionist barriers that we inherited from the EU.
Barriers that even the EU’s own scientific advisory body says are baseless.
Plenty of British farmers would gladly ditch these barriers and become more competitive in world markets.
But the National Farmers’ Union, which would have preferred to remain in EU, wants to stay where we are.
And, of course, the civil servants and Labour MPs who secretly long to go back in don’t want to diverge.
For the sake of privileging EU imports, we are losing the prospect of becoming a successful global trading nation.
Even worse, we are agreeing to take someone else’s rules without discussion or negotiation forever.
What serious country contracts out its laws to foreign officials? When did we become so diminished as a people?
- Lord Hannan of Kingsclere is a Conservative peer and President of the Institute for Free Trade