And as you noted, the Conservative Party is the least likely one to care about bottom-up solutions and effects.
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Yup…
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Thanks, understood.
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We’ve just got on a waiting list for a waiting list. No, really.
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I don’t know what you’re reading but a 4% decline in GDP directly due to Brexit sounds like more than that! And if you are referring only to the costs if food imports are delayed (or reduced as exporters from EU can’t be bothered any more) that also sounds too low, and takes no account of shortages that will ensue, either.
A huge proportion of our fresh fruit and veg comes from EU and many EU exporters can sell all they can grow with less hassle, within the EU, these days.
Not an ideal example, being ‘luxury’ foods, but a valid example nonetheless:
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I’ve noticed Jamie Oliver playing up domestic veg on his cooking videos recently. There’s also a heavy emphasis on keeping food costs low, and always giving the cost per portion. It does make it clear that recent times have been tough, and probably only going to get tougher.
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Citation needed.
I don’t follow food safety recall news in the UK, so I don’t know if this has been an issue or not, but here in the US we regularly get recalls because of salmonella or E. coli contamination, metal flakes, dangerous chemicals, food allergen contamination, etc.
@fuzzyfungus hit the nail on the head about regulatory arbitrage. I’ve lived that experience: I recall Turkish foods being sold to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan because they didn’t meet EU standards. Nothing like buying a package of cookies with a big ol’ sticker on it boldly proclaiming: “Strictly not for sale in the EU.”
Or, put another way: if you wouldn’t just accept any old pharmaceutical entering the UK without standards and inspections, then you shouldn’t accept food, which you probably put more of in your body on a daily basis.
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I don’t think anyone is arguing against food and drug safety standards. My point is simply that the standards in place in the EU and the UK are good enough for the people in both of those places to conclude that their food is safe, even though the standards are (inevitably) different. If both sides simply agreed to accept the other’s health and safety standards as good enough (though different), neither citizens in the EU nor the UK would be made significantly less safe as a result. Why won’t they do that? Because both sides use health and safety regulations as a weapon to protect their local producers from foreign competition (to the detriment of local consumers.)
One side deliberately chooses to distance itself from H&S standards, that it, to some degree, had actually formulated and replace them with weaker – not to protect producers, but to prolong the ruling party and to bolster profits for manufacturers, distributors and retailers – there are very rich producers, but far more who literally scrape a living.
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Yes, well, of course that’s how protectionism inevitably ends up working in practice: those who end up protected are the friends, family, and various hangers-on of whoever is in power…
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Because standards are standards. It’s the whole point of them.
(plus what @anon33176345 said.)
There may be some of this but protecting consumers from substandard food is exactly the opposite of being to their detriment.
Compared to the US very much not, I believe. Seeing news items here about food recalls is fairly rare - and it does make the news when it happens. (One of the reasons many of us are against importing chickens from the US that need to be washed in chlorine before they are safe.)
No - but that is a whole other can of worms. The number of critical drugs that are in short supply or impossible to find is growing monthly here in Brexit paradise and whilst there are some other causes, at least one of which is from the UK govt shooting itself in the foot by the way it taxes this area, much of it is very much a ‘Brexit bonus’.
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While protectionism is definitely part of the story with different food and drug regulations, there is also regulatory capture.
Which group of regulators are more subject to political (and consequently corporate) pressure? Living in the US, but having lived in Europe in the late 1900s, I keep an eye on drug approvals and food standards in the EU.
I take particular note of any chemicals (looking at you fire retardants in furniture and kid pajamas) that are banned in Europe but which the EPA/FDA can not surmount the political pressure to take any action against.
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We really don’t need to go back to the time when no one really regulated food and drugs. Regulation benefits the consumer… 
Free trade and tax cuts aren’t fixes for everything.
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In our family we often use the metric ‘this is made in the EU and thus has more exacting H&S standards than US products’ when deciding what to buy.
It doesn’t matter what Joe Blow on the street thinks; the point of government regulation of food products is that trained experts in health and safety are the ones testing the products to ensure they actually are safe.
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The Conservatives, Labour and LibDems - who between them mop up almost every seat in England (which accounts for 543 Commons seats out of 650) - have all said they have no intention to revisit Brexit, despite the fact it is a clear failure. Something, something, sovereignty, Pound Sterling, blue passports, happy fish.
There’s precious little chance of us even trying to get an EEA deal similar to the EFTA countries as that would mean signing up to supremacy of the ECJ and freedom of movement which would cause a collective aneurism in half the country.
Much as I would love us to go back into the EU, no politician wants to reopen that battle again. We’re out - probably for the next couple of decades - minimum.
And that is a fucking tragedy - the people who got us here should be on trial for the damage they’ve done to the UK - instead they’re getting peerages, company directorships and lucrative TV and newspaper gigs.
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Even he’s going to struggle to find many things to do with turnips.
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Boil ‘em, mash ‘em, cook ‘em in a stew!
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Forget Jamie Oliver. Baldrick has a cunning plan.
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