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. Jobs must be categorised by specialism, shortage, pay and length of stay. Vast Whitehall charts must be mapping labour flows. The Home Office aversion to foreigners has bred a “hostile environment” culture. At the end of last year, private care homes were forced to sack 50,000 unvaccinated staff. To pretend to compensate, the government then offered care homes extra visas. It turned out they could be only for one year – despite the essence of care being continuity. As for getting a visa, it is said to take a minimum of 16 weeks.
I care about elderly people more than I do pigs, but the principle is the same. Both are victims not – repeat not – of the UK’s decision to leave the European Union. They are victims of Boris Johnson’s subsequent decision, to aid him in toppling Theresa May, to interpret Brexit as requiring Britain to depart the world’s most efficient and benign economic entity, the single market. This had been in large part the creation in 1986 of the right’s hero, Margaret Thatcher, to honour her free-market principles.
Leaving the EU had some arguments for it. Leaving the single market had none. “Soft” Brexit within that market would have been far been easier to negotiate. Leaving it has meant wrecked supply chains and terminated scientific collaboration. It has undermined recruitment patterns and destabilised Northern Ireland. It has crippled the fish industry and impeded billions of pounds of UK trade. Its consequences have wavered between nuisance and disaster.
Brexit has seen a consummation of the very thing Tories are supposed to hate – bureaucracy. Whitehall officials used to be accused of “gold plating” Brussels regulations. “Taking back control” has licensed their wildest dreams. Brexit is estimated to have required a civil service army of 50,000 new officials, more than the entire central bureaucracy of the EU in Brussels. The latest addition to this apparat is Jacob Rees-Mogg calling himself the “Brexit opportunities” minister. His first act has been desperate, to “implore” readers of the Sun to tell him what opportunities they could think of.
Rees-Mogg is now advocating an Institute of Economic Affairs suggestion to boost trade with other countries by abolishing non-tariff barriers and “recognising [their] regulations, without requiring reciprocity, starting with the EU”. Why should they negotiate at all? Surely this negates the whole point of “taking back control”. But then the government is also desperate to reopen trade talks with the US and China. The idea that Britain might “control” such talks is beyond naive.
The battered band of Brexiters is now seen as wandering in a hostile desert, mystified at why their promised land has failed to materialise. Former European partners were supposed to come crawling to London begging for business. We were told: “They need us more than we need them.” But Europe’s other nations have no interest in rewarding separatism of any sort. A Britain divided, weakened and ill-led is merely the subject of scorn and ridicule. Chaos at Dover is an excellent advertisement for European union.
Britain’s position as an island has to be one that trades openly with the mainland. Sooner or later, the free movement of goods, services, capital and labour will have to be restored, however painfully. It would greatly help if Labour’s Keir Starmer stopped vacillating and committed himself to that objective, as should candidates for Johnson’s succession. No, this is not revoking Brexit or rejoining the EU. It is just embracing sanity.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
