The evidence is all around us: life outside the single market is an utter disaster
A massacre is occurring. More than 35,000 healthy British pigs have been slaughtered and buried on farms since September, with an estimated 200,000 languishing in a backlog.
The reason is that abattoirs lack the staff to process them, largely due to Britain’s exit from the pan-European labour market. In October, the environment department offered 800 six-month visas for foreign butchers. But it insisted they go through its laborious scheme for seasonal workers: barely 100 turned up. Whitehall also refuses to curb imports of European pork – which now makes up 60% of the UK market and rising. To the National Pig Association, Brexit means buy from Europe.
For pig farmers, we can read apple growers, flower producers, fishing fleets, road hauliers, house builders, medicine suppliers, care home managers – a whole range of workers on the frontline of Britain’s economy. All have benefited in the past from the open market in European labour. All must now lobby Whitehall for permits, visas, waivers and, if not, compensation. Hundred-page documents must accompany every food convoy to and from Dover and Belfast, where hours of tailbacks quietly rot produce.
You might think all this comes from some statist socialist regime. Yet it is the brainchild of the right wing of the Conservative party, now in government. Ironically, the last such seismic distortion of the free market was also instigated by a lapsed libertarian Tory, Edward Heath, with his statutory controls on incomes and prices to combat inflation in 1972. This saw Whitehall officials invading company offices and vetting individual payslips.
Those officials are now peering into food containers and poring over job advertisements, exerting the full force of their regulatory zeal.
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