My Lords, I regret Brexit, but I support the targeting of financial support to farmers to secure environmental enhancement, food security and safety, and the welfare of animals and plants. I hope that small family and hill farms will get a better deal, as opposed to the cereal barons and city-owned megafarms that the CAP seems to favour. However, I will put down a few markers.
First, I fully concur with my noble friend Lord Tyler’s concern over the protection of GIs. Can the Minister tell us the Government’s plans in this respect, whether for Cornish pasties or other products? Secondly, there should be no threat to the production and marketing of kosher and halal food in the wake of Brexit. Thirdly, I fear that the Government will torpedo British farmers’ and consumers’ interests by giving in to US pressure on food standards. As others have said, the US produces food to standards that many of us regard as very bad practice and which EU law prevents. Even if the response was, “We won’t ban them but will require them to be labelled”, that is not an adequate substitute in all cases—and anyway, we know from the experience over GMOs that the US will fight that tooth and nail.
The Government have made much of their manifesto promise, reflected in a letter from the two Secretaries of State, that they would
“not compromise on our high environmental protection, animal welfare and food standards.”
The problem is that this pledge was set in the context, and with the caveat, that the Government would not so compromise
“In all our trade negotiations.”
As we have heard, Neil Parish, the Conservative chair of the EFRA Select Committee, clearly did not trust the Government. Hence, he was among those—my colleague Tim Farron was another—who tabled amendments in the other place last month to try to avoid the commitments being, as he put it,
“traded away on the altar of cheap food.”
If the Government’s pledges meant anything, why did they rally their troops to defeat those amendments?
I fear that the Government are leaving themselves plenty of wiggle room. There are reports of a plan to apply tariffs on lower standard products, apparently
with the idea that US producers would thus find it uneconomic to send them here. What is the state of play on this reported plan and how does it accord with the manifesto and ministerial pledges? In any case, as the Times columnist Clare Foges put it well on Monday, the pledge not to lower our standards through trade negotiations does not prevent them doing so through domestic legislation; hence the refusal to agree a level playing field in the EU negotiations.
Given the experience in the other place last month, it would seem that the Government could rely on their loyal lobby fodder to get a diminution of standards through. As it was put in the Financial Times yesterday:
“For Mr Johnson … a deal with the US is a strategic imperative … Washington’s price will be … a decisive British break with EU rules and regulations. It is looking more and more as if Mr Johnson is ready to pay this price.”
Mr Johnson might be ready to pay that price, but it is British farmers and consumers who would take the hit. As my noble friend Lady Parminter said at the beginning of this debate, Liberal Democrats are determined to stop that—as, apparently, are noble Lords across the House.
3.40 pm