EU Affairs: spectacular incompetence

By Richard North - May 22, 2025

In a “shock-horror-probe” piece, the Telegraph displays its technical illiteracy with the headline: “British farmers face EU spot checks under Starmer’s Brexit deal”.

Foreign officials, we are told, are to be given powers to inspect UK farms, abattoirs and supermarkets under Startmer’s “reset” agreement, with the paper pompously declaring that “British farmers will face EU spot checks”.

The paper goes on to tell us that the prime minister’s agreement hands over permissions to EU agencies to conduct random inspections at farms and food production sites to ensure they are compliant with the bloc’s rules.

One never fails to be dismayed by the British media’s ignorance of EU affairs, and this is another graphic example. Not only is this provision built into the Trade & Cooperation Agreement (Article 79), it applies to every third country in the world that exports food to EU member states, typified by this agreement between the EU and New Zealand.

In terms of food safety and quality standards, there is probably no better country than New Zealand, yet one sees Article 10, which states that: “To maintain confidence in the effective implementation of the provisions of this Agreement, each Party shall have the right to carry out audit and verification procedures of the exporting Party”.

These procedures, the article states, “may include: (a) an assessment of all or part of the responsible authorities’ total control programme, including, where appropriate, reviews of the inspection and audit programmes; and (b) on-the-spot checks”.

These audits are carried out by the Commission’s Directorate-General for Health and Food Safety, formerly known as the Food & Veterinary Office (FVO), located near Dublin.

I have written about this many times, for instance here, written in 2013 and presciently entitled “governed in ignorance”. Nothing much changes.

Of course, the hacks don’t read independent news blogs, especially those written by experts. And if I am reluctant to call myself an expert on any number of things, my original profession was food safety. It was this discipline in which I read for my PhD and I truly would count myself and expert in food safety systems.

And yet, the pig ignorant Joe Barnes, the Telegraph’s Brussels Correspondent, and Tony Diver, an associate political editor, see fit to run this as a news story.

To get there, these dismal hacks write of having consulted “two government sources” about the impact of Starmer agreeing that Britain would “dynamically align” to the EU’s rulebook for food standards and come under the auspices of the European Court of Justice.

These sources apparently tell the hacks that “that this would mean accepting spot checks being carried out by EU officials at British farms, abattoirs and supermarkets”, although they do quote one official who says: “It’s completely normal for different members of the same SPS [sanitary and phytosanitary] arrangements to complete routine checks on each other”.

This actually understates the position. It is an essential element of any EU SPS agreement, yet that hacks still blather about the checks being “likely to fuel further suspicions that Sir Keir’s reset will significantly erode Brexit freedoms”.

But if the hacks are completely unaware of their own ignorance, so too are the Tories. Victoria Atkins, the shadow environment secretary, is quoted as saying: “Labour’s agreement with the EU is starting to unravel. The fishing industry has described the deal to me as a ‘horror show’. And we are now starting to see what this will really mean for farmers and just how far Keir Starmer has been played”.

And on she dribbles: “Rather than allow Eurocrat inspectors to intrude, interfere and punish UK farmers, the secretary of state should actually visit a farm to hear how his family farm tax is breaking British farming”, she says.

Not content with this technically illiterate garbage, she adds: “With £6 billion of fishing rights for the EU, the loss of our right to set our own food rules and now Eurocrat inspectors nosing into UK farms, this is a bad deal for British farming and fishing. When Labour negotiates, Britain loses”.

However, the tail end of the article then tells us it is commonplace for officials from EU countries to carry out checks on other member states when they suspect the bloc’s rules are not being properly enforced. These controls, it says, are carried out with little to no warning and can result in businesses being shut down if they are deemed to be in breach of EU standards.

They can’t even get that right. These audits are not carried out by “EU countries” but by the Commission and are carried out as a matter of routine, according to a rolling programme.

Oddly enough the system of external checks was pioneered by the British, in the wake of the Aberdeen Typhoid Outbreak in 1964, after the outbreak was shown to be caused by failures in an Argentinian corned beef plant.

The paper thus tells us that Brussels has a history of carrying out similar controls in Canada, New Zealand and Brazil, after signing trade agreements with the countries, informing us also that British officials will also be allowed to send teams of inspectors to the Continent to ensure the rules are being followed under the prime minister’s deal.

Perpetuating its initial error, though, the hacks aver that such controls are usually carried out after the discovery of tainted food inside the bloc’s single market.

Health certificates, they go on, are used to trace a product to its source, such as a farm or an abattoir, before any decisions are made on whether to shut down businesses to prevent the further spread of potentially harmful products in the supply chain.

In conclusion, we are advised that “campaigners have previously used the results of such audits to demand a ban on imports of meat from Brazil to the bloc”.

This additional block of information, though, essentially kills the story, even in the woolly terms set out by Barnes and Diver, To judge from the online comments, though, none of the readers seem to have stuck to the report right to the end and are missing the detail.

But if the privately educated nepo-baby Victoria Atkins is indicative of the standard of shadow minister in the Tories, it is no wonder that little Olukemi is in trouble.

Not least, Atkins also seems unaware that Starmer has not yet actually concluded an SPS Agreement, even if awareness is gradually emerging, with Juliet Samuel writing in The Times of the “two elements” of agriculture and energy. Calling them “agreements”, she says, “is premature. They are agreements to agree”.

And although the air is thick with cries of “betrayal” over the fishing deal, no-one is writing about the betrayal of the meat industry, where the EU’s veterinary regime has contributed to the almost complete destruction of artisan small slaughterhouses, and family-owned middle ranking businesses.

Brexit gave us the chance to revisit the regulation of the meat sector, on opportunity which has been comprehensively missed, and now Starmer is in the process of closing down any prospect of securing a less onerous regime.

But the meat sector is not alone in being shafted. As the Guardian recounts, local authorities which have invested heavily in new, state-of-the-art Border Control Posts (BCPs) for their port health inspectorates now find themselves lumbered with expensive buildings for which there will be no role.

Over 100 BCPs around the country have been built to government specifications to handle post-Brexit checks on imports subject to SPS checks. Between central and local government, well over £300 million has been spent on infrastructure, while operating costs for the under-used building are costing port operators millions.

There no seems little doubt that the post-Brexit handling of the SPS regime will be marked as a spectacular episode of incompetence by successive governments, one that continues to this day.