Farmers warned of Brexit no-deal ‘turbulence’

Every farmer and person from a rural community needs to watch this video and realise the consequences of what is coming upon Brexit.

Mr Gove said the UK was on the cusp of a “fourth agricultural revolution”

Farmers and food producers face “considerable turbulence” if the UK leaves the EU with no deal, Environment Secretary Michael Gove has said.

He told the Oxford Farming Conference it was a “grim and inescapable fact” there would be tariffs on exports and new sanitary and other border checks.

While “not perfect”, he said Theresa May’s Brexit deal would protect market access and provide economic certainty.

But Labour said “basic legislation” was not in place to prepare for Brexit.

And environmental campaigners said Mr Gove should set up an independent regulator to ensure that minimum standards to protect water, soil, wildlife and animal welfare are maintained.

Farmers seek food standards law after Brexit

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The UK is scheduled to leave the EU on 29 March, with MPs due to vote in the Commons in mid-January on the prime minister’s withdrawal bill.

Urging MPs to support the PM’s deal, Mr Gove said it would ensure the UK left the Common Agricultural Policy but, at the same time, provide a smooth transition period for agriculture and guarantee continuous tariff-free and quota-free access to EU markets.

From 2021, he said, the UK would be able to “largely diverge from EU regulation”, enabling it to pursue its land management priorities and invest in technology which the EU has “turned its back on”.

“All of these are real gains that our departure from the EU can bring, but these real gains risk being undermined if we leave the EU without a deal,” he said.

Subsidies for farmers will continue to be paid at the current EU level until 2022

Mr Gove, a leading figure in the 2016 Leave campaign, rejected suggestions that warnings about the economic impact of a no-deal exit were being over-stated and another example of “Project Fear”.

“No-one can be blithe or blase about the real impact on food producers in this country of leaving without a deal,” he said.

Gove sets out post-Brexit farm funding
New EU fishing rules ‘could hurt UK industry’
It was a “grim and inescapable fact”, he said, that beef and lamb exports could face export tariffs of at least 40% if the UK defaulted to World Trade Organization rules, while standard tariffs of 11% could be levied on a host of agricultural products.

“The combination of significant tariffs, where none exist now, friction and checks at the border, where none exist now, and the requirements to re-route or pay more for transport when current arrangements are frictionless, will all add to costs for producers,” he said.

The government has guaranteed to pay subsidies to farmers at current EU levels until 2022.

After that there will be a “transitional period” in England, with an increasing link between funds and maintaining “public goods”, such as access to the countryside and planting meadows.

Mr Gove said these commitments offered farmers greater certainty than their EU competitors.

‘Fantasy deal’
But Conservative former minister Guto Bebb, who backs another Brexit referendum, said the proposed deal would leave “all the big questions unanswered”.

“There is no kind of fantasy Brexit deal that can meet all the promises made to farmers or the rural economy,” he said.

And Labour said Mr Gove’s vision for the future of farming was “irrelevant while basic legislation is not even in place and there are serious concerns about Defra’s preparedness for a no-deal scenario that would be devastating for farmers”.

The National Farmers Union said an “orderly” Brexit was vital for the industry’s future prosperity and to fail to deliver that would be “catastrophic”.

“That’s primarily because a lot of our input, 90% of our animal medicines and vaccines, chemicals and fertilisers, are produced in the EU,” its president Minette Batters said.

“We don’t make those kind of things in the UK any more.”

In his speech, Mr Gove insisted maintaining animal welfare and food safety was critical to the industry’s reputation and sustainability and the UK “must not barter them away in a short-term trade off”.

The NFU is calling for “more than warm words” on the issue, with specific legislation to ensure the same standards are applied to imported food as home-grown produce.

With many thanks to: BBC England (Politics) for the original story.

Six of Theresa May’s cabinet ministers are members of a secret group the European Research Group (ERG) demanding a total break from the European Union

The head of the secretive European Research Group won’t reveal which senior ministers are members of the hardline anti-EU group. Why not? Because the answer and the reach of the ERG leaves the Prime Minister looking like a Brexit hostage.

Suella Fernandes, ERG chair, being interviewed by Channel 4 News – Fair use.

Six leading members of Theresa May’s cabinet are paid-up subscribers of the secretive European Research Group, the hard-line anti-EU caucas of Conservative MPs who have serially refused to publish their membership list.

New data collected by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority covering the last year, show that the six cabinet members, along with the chief of staff and special adviser to the Brexit secretary, David Davis have each claimed £2,000 in parliamentary expenses for “professional” and “pooled” services from the ERG. Five other subscriptions from former Tory cabinet ministers and whips, plus the current chair of the ERG, means this group alone have claimed more than £32,000 from the public purse.

Michael Gove, the environment secretary, Penny Mordaunt, the newly-promoted defence secretary, David Gauk, the work and pensions secretary, Sajid Javid, the communities and local government secretary, Andrea Leadsom, the Leader of the House of Commons, and Chris Grayling, the transport secretary, have all used official expenses claims to pay for “ERG subscriptions” over the last 12 months.

Stewart Jackson, who lost his Peterborough seat in June’s general election, and is now chief of staff to David Davis at the Department for Exiting the European Union, also used his official expenses to pay for ERG services during the last years.

Private list
In September this year, during a live television interview from the lobby in Westminster on the back of an openDemocracy investigation into the group, the current chair of the ERG, Suella Fernandes, refused to say which ministers were members of her organisation.

The ERG’s membership is routinely rumoured to be around 80 MPs, with Eurosceptic cabinet ministers having previously signed up to letters that effectively mirror ERG objectives.

However, today’s revelation shows the group’s paid-up subscribers reach deep into the core of Theresa May’s administration, and have been seen as deeply worrying.

Hidden hurdle
One senior Whitehall official, who asked not to be named because he was currently involved in preparations for the next phase of talks with the EU’s negotiators, told openDemocracy: “2018 will be a difficult and critical year and those from Brussels we have to engage with, have already voiced concern that our future position could be clearer. But there will be added suspicion that this secretive group – and if they won’t publish who their members are and what they do, then secret is the correct word – represents a hidden hurdle by Brussels that the UK government has to jump over. This will hinder, not help, the prospects of a deal.”

Other data collated by IPSA show that 58 MPs have recently used taxpayers’ money to fund the ERG’s activities. Among the leading Brexiteers who have paid for ERG subscriptions over the course of the last two parliaments include Jacob Rees-Mogg, who is still being touted as a future Tory leader should May be forced out of 10 Downing Street.

The group is often described as a party-within-a-party of hardline Brexiteers capable of holding the prime minister hostage or removing her from office if she deviates from their stated aim of severing all ties with the European Economic Area, the single market, the European Court and the Customs Union.

The re-invented ERG
The Brexit minister and Wycombe MP, Steve Baker, is regarded as the most powerful figure linked to the ERG. Baker was the head of the group before he was promoted into the government. Though it was founded in 1998, Baker is credited with turning the ERG from a backwater of low-profile Eurosceptic malcontents into a powerful organisation capable of deciding the terms and merits of any deal with Brussels.

He has described any move towards a soft Brexit or any retention of links with the EU as “a vote for the UK to be powerless and poorer than we can otherwise be.”

Although he now holds no formal role in the group, restricted meetings of ERG members in Westminster have been addressed by Baker since June, with his speeches enthusiastically applauded.

openDemocracy has previously revealed that Baker took a £6,500 donation from the Constitutional Research Council to pay for an ERG event before Christmas 2016. We have also revealed that the CRC chairman, Richard Cook, founded a company in 2013 with the former head of the Saudi intelligence service and a Danish spy implicated in a controversial Indian gun-running case. Our research has also shown that Baker has previously accepted cash and foreign travel from a wide-range of groups, including the arms industry, and a number of American pro-corporate lobby groups.

Fernandes, who only became an MP in the 2015 election, took over as chair of the ERG in June this year following Baker’s move to David Davis’s department. She has described negotiations with Brussels over the terms of Brexit as “begging the EU for mercy”. She has told ERG members in texts sent on a highly-protected WhatsApp messaging group, that they should not forget the referendum was an “instruction to parliament to free the UK from the shackles of Europe.”

Channel Four News
In her interview with Channel Four News – which followed an investigation by openDemocracy which discovered over a quarter of a million pounds of public funds had been channelled to the ERG through MPs expenses – Fernandes refused to say how many government ministers were in the ERG.

Told repeatedly by the Channel Four News presenter, Krishnan Guru-Murthy that if her group took public money then the public should have a right to know, Fernandes looked uneasy. Resorting to awkward laughing, and clearly unsettled she replied, “The list of MPs is known to the ERG.”

Both Channel Four News and openDemocracy have repeated requests to Fernandes’ office for a full list of the ERG membership, its research, and the cost of its publically funded operations. No list has been provided.

Following complaints by MPs that public cash was being misused by the ERG because it focused on a single-issue, Brexit, and operated as a party-political organisation, IPSA recently carried out an updated review of its claimed research.

IPSA identified “party-political language” in some of the material produced by the ERG. However it concluded that because the ERG had been in existence before the EU referendum, and because “the vast majority of material produced was factual, informative” and not in conflict with IPSA regulations, no action was being taken.

However IPSA would not comment on the ERG continuing to keep its membership lists private and largely out of public reach.

Francis Grove-White, Deputy Director of Open Britain, said:

“It is illuminating, and deeply worrying, to see who is really pulling the strings of the government’s hard Brexit trajectory.

“The ERG are in favour of the most destructive Brexit possible: they want to tear up all our economic co-operation with Europe in pursuit of a low-regulation, race-to-the-bottom agenda that most people in Britain do not support.

“If Ministers are claiming taxpayers’ money as allowances to pay for membership fees of this group, then the public have every right to know exactly who in the Government is a registered ERG member.

“The ERG should publish this information immediately. If they have nothing to hide, they will have no problem doing so. If they do not make this information public, people will draw their own conclusions.”

The ERG was contacted by openDemocracy and invited to comment on the subscriptions of cabinet members. No reply was received.

Do you know where the Brexit dark money came from? Someone out there knows something about the DUP’s mystery £435,000 Brexit spending spree. It’s vital for democracy that we all find out.

We need your help to expose the DUP

Theresa May is desperately clinging to power, relying on the DUP, the hard-right party that has blocked same-sex marriage, and kept abortion illegal.

Worse still, they’re bankrolled by dark money – we’ve exposed the shady group behind their lavish pro-Brexit campaigning, but they’re still refusing to name their secret donors. Now they hold the balance of power at Westminster, it’s even more vital that we find out who their paymasters are.

With many thanks to: James Cusick, Open Democracy for the origional story