Selling out Britain’s farmers for a deal with New Zealand

You will find very little mention of it in the UK’s media, but the EU has just signed a free trade agreement with New Zealand.

That is the very same New Zealand that the UK so desperately wanted a trade deal with that it had to leave the EU to get one. The UK has, it is true, got a head start on the EU as it signed a deal with NZ last year, so Brexit gained us a one-year head start, maximum. Unfortunately, the negotiations which happened at breakneck speed to achieve that massive Brexit bonanza were led by Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.

As you can probably guess the EU trade deal, is as a result, far superior to the one that the UK managed to negotiate. It was so biased in favour of the Kiwis that their TV news ran a report laughing at the UK’s stupidity and highlighting how the deal did far more to boost New Zealand’s agriculture sector than the British one.

Alongside the deal with Australia this means the British farming industry is going to face an avalanche of cheaper Antipodean lamb, beef, pork, cheese and butter. All tariffs and quotas will be eliminated in the coming years which as Minette Batters the president of the NFU put it at the time will expose “sensitive sectors like beef and lamb, dairy and horticulture” to unfair competition. That is because “UK farm businesses face significantly higher costs of production than farmers in New Zealand, and margins are likely to tighten further in the face of rising input costs, higher energy bills and labour shortages”.

Under the EU/NZ deal the EU will allow a beef quota of just 10,000 tonnes a year to be imported with reduced duty of 7.5%, phased in over 7 years. 38,000 tonnes of sheep meat will be imported duty free, 25,000 tonnes of cheese imported duty free.

So, the UK government obviously opened up its entire agricultural industry to massively unfair competition when it didn’t have to, in order to get a deal that will make such a small difference to the UK economy that it is hardly measurable.

But Boris Johnson did get his day on the front pages claiming that he had secured a triumph for Britain and that Brexit was enabling a free and independent country to trade with the world.

This is just another example of the permanent cost and damage that having an egotistical idiot in charge of the country can do.

The Tory government and the Brexiteers who wooed the farming sector for decades to get them to vote for Brexit, promised them more subsidies and less red tape. It does rather reduce my sympathy for their plight that so many farmers were greedy and shallow enough to fall for that.

But even the most pro EU and sensible farmer could not have imagined that a Tory government would sell them down the river at the first opportunity and betray them so badly that New Zealander would openly mock them.

But they did, the EU/NZ trade deal proves it.