Brexit has not made food unaffordable

Imagine that for the past 30 years all food entering Britain from EU countries had been subject to stringent sanitary checks and that today, for the first time, the government had decided to abolish those checks. It isn’t hard to guess how the Labour party would react.

The government, it would be claiming, was throwing our farming and horticultural industries to the wall in the name of an ideological commitment to deregulation. Britain was being opened up to infection from devastating diseases like swine fever and foot and mouth disease – all so that the government’s friends in the food import industry could trim a few percent off their costs in order to boost their profits.

That, however, is not what is happening. In fact, it is the reverse of what is happening. Today, sanitary checks are being introduced for the first time on food imports from the EU – a result of Brexit, but one which has been delayed several times in order so that the right systems can be installed.