WHY EVERYTHING BAD IS BLAMED ON BREXIT
Farming is a microcosm of the government's failure to make a success of Brexit
Last week, for a couple of days Waitrose had some difficulties resupplying fresh food to their supermarkets. Brexit-hating Remainer Remoaners – who have now morphed into Rejoiners - gleefully posted photos on Twitter, blaming our departure from the EU for Britain's 'food shortage' and mocking Leave voters for the calamity they had wrought on the UK. The truth was, however, that there was no food shortage at all – the other supermarkets' shelves were laden with produce – and Waitrose's difficulties were purely due to an IT glitch, which was quickly resolved.
So why was there such a ridiculous over-reaction by the EU quislings? Because they have deliberately adopted a simple (but effective) strategy of systematically blaming everything that is bad on Brexit, in the hope that they can reverse the Leave vote. They have copied the so-called Goebbels 'big lie' strategy. As everyone knows, Goebbels' propaganda policy was that “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it”. Err, except that he never said any such thing. In what is probably the world's greatest and most amusing irony, this 'well-known fact' is itself a lie that has become accepted due to having been repeated so often! Nevertheless, psychological studies have proved that if people repeatedly hear a statement they do become more inclined to believe it. There is even a name for this (of course there is – psychologists love labelling everything!): the illusory truth effect. This is why we must stop allowing the lie that Brexit has damaged Britain (whether it is our economy, our food supply, or any other aspect of life in the UK) to be constantly repeated without challenging it and demonstrating that it is false.
Food inflation
A big, and genuine, problem Britain is facing right now is inflation, and particularly food inflation. So of course we are repeatedly told that this is due to – or at the very least, has been aggravated by - Brexit. Is this true? Of course not. Let's look at the facts: food inflation in the UK peaked in March at 19.2%. And in the EU Paradise? Food inflation there also peaked in March, but at 19.6%. In both the UK and EU it has started to very slowly fall since then. So, EU-fanatics, how d'you like them EU Garden of Eden apples? They're no cheaper than our satanic Brexit ones!
People with an axe to grind will try to play with the statistics (you know the saying about 'lies, damned lies and statistics') to cherry-pick the ones that suit their argument best, and while it's true that the figures in the UK and the EU are not compiled in precisely the same way, these are the overall figures, from the official bodies (the ONS in the UK and Eurostat in the EU) and give the fairest comparison. I could have used the figures from the British Retail Consortium, who say that food inflation in the UK peaked (in April) at a lower 15.7%, or I could have singled out good comparator countries like Germany, for instance, or Sweden, where the March food inflation figures were higher still, at 22.9% and 21% respectively, or I could have focused on some specific foods, or specific peak months, such as milk, cheese and eggs, for which the January inflation rate in Germany was a shocking 36%. But I'm not like that. I am fair and accurate, as you'd expect from a scientist. I tell the truth. And while we have problems in Britain these are not related to Brexit and things in the EU are just as bad, if not marginally worse.
Occasionally an economic report will come out alleging that Brexit has had some negative effect, but these reports are generally from biased pro-EU organisations and are so economically illiterate that you have to conclude that the authors are either mentally retarded or just deliberately lying. For instance, the Brexit-haters say the cost of food imports from the EU has gone up because of the non-tariff barriers that have been introduced on food. But, as I reported recently, the British government “has delayed putting in place the paperwork checks four times – meaning that while UK producers have to surmount complex checks and incur large costs to sell to the EU, EU producers have no such problems when exporting to Britain, and therefore have a hugely unfair commercial advantage.” If you haven't read that article I highly recommend you do so (as well as all the other absolutely brilliant articles in my 'back catalogue'!). See here: https://britishpatriot.substack.com/p/ive-got-news-for-you
So why are we – throughout Europe – having such high food inflation? The clue lies in the fact that this high rate of inflation has hit Europe more than other countries around the world (in the US, for instance, last month it was just 7.7%). Partly it is because of poor harvests in Europe and North Africa last year due to extreme weather disruptions. Then there was an outbreak of bird flu, which drastically reduced egg production. And finally there was, of course, the Ukraine war, which has driven up the price of wheat, vegetable oil and fertilisers (the cost of which has trebled!). It has also led to a rise in energy prices, which has pushed up the cost of food production, transport and storage.
British ELMS disease
The reason the Britain-hating EU-fanatics can get away with their deceitful Brexit bashing is that the government hasn't used our new-found freedoms to actually make anything better. Farming is an excellent example of the wasted opportunities. When we were in the EU one of the perennial points of contention was the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the EU's farming subsidy, and leaving gave the UK the opportunity to set its own agricultural support mechanism. We have (finally!) done this, and it is called ELMS – the Environmental Land Management Schemes. Unfortunately, it is a complete disaster - worse even that the CAP! The amount of funding has remained the same - £2.4 billion a year – which itself should raise suspicion. Why precisely the same amount? Was it exactly right? Given that the CAP was not designed with the UK in mind that would seem a remarkable coincidence. No. It's clear the government has just been too stupid and too lazy to calculate the right amount for UK farming, and just rolled over the existing budget. Seven years after voting to leave and the mentally-retarded Tories still haven't learnt how to govern. God, how I despise them!
Coming up with a well-devised plan for a multi-billion pound annual farm payments scheme would have allowed us to completely revitalise our farming sector. Former MI5 chief Eliza Manningham-Buller warned last year that domestic food production should be viewed as an issue of national security. She was right. The situation is frightening. According to the government, “In 2020, the UK imported 46% of the food it consumed”, but an independent analysis by the bank HSBC in 2019 said that in reality 80% of food is imported into the UK, because the government statistic "defines food processed in the UK as UK food, even though the ingredients may have been imported. For example, tea is processed in the UK, but we grow no tea — it is all imported. When ingredients are counted as imported, the real figure is over 80%”. You can question the HSBC's analysis (should tea, for instance, be counted as food?), but even if the government's statistic were right, importing over half of our food is not acceptable. So is the government using its new ELMS to increase food production? NO. Quite the opposite. While the CAP had an explicit goal of protecting food production, ELMS emphasises looking after the environment and will pay farmers for rewilding, cutting their use of chemicals and working towards net zero. The Times quotes one farmer, who runs a 200-year-old hop and fruit farm, as saying: “For me to access the environmental management scheme, I have to forgo income and plant things which are good for the environment instead”. This is utter madness! Of course the environment matters, and we all want a beautiful countryside, but farmers exist to farm and provide food, and the government is forcing them to reduce their output. The government has a policy of national suicide.
It's not just me making this up. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, itself says that it will “support more radical changes to land-use change and habitat restoration such as establishing new nature reserves, restoring floodplains, or creating woodland and wetlands” - that's all fine, but has it forgotten the word “FOOD” in its title? No wonder we are told that “farmers have expressed concern that the scheme could undermine agricultural production and increase costs for producers”. The problem is the mentally-retarded ministers whose farming strategy is based entirely on net zero and environmental issues instead of increasing food production. Some analysts claim that this is not a mistake at all, but the government's true agenda: to import cheap foreign food and rewild British farms to achieve the net zero they are obsessed with. As Tom Bradshaw of the National Farmers Union said: “At a time when public support for British food and farming is at a high, our biggest concern is that these schemes result in reduced food production in the UK, leading to the need to import more food from countries with production standards that would be illegal for our farmers here. This simply off-shores our production and any environmental impacts that go with it”.
As I said, ELMS is, incredibly, even worse than the CAP. A Britain-hating Rejoiner will cry: 'you see, Brexit has failed', but the truth is that it isn't Brexit that has failed, but the retarded Tories. But the beauty of Brexit is that, like an adorable puppy, it is for life, not just for Christmas. It may begin by peeing on the floor but you can train it to behave better, and British governments will also learn to improve. Because those that don't will be voted out. Which is something we couldn't do with the European Commission. And that's the beauty of democracy. As Winston Churchill once said: “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others”.
A patriotic farming policy
A patriotic, nationalist farming strategy would begin by setting a sensible primary goal – such as cutting food imports by 50% within 5 years – and then work out how to achieve that, devoting 75% of funding towards this and the remaining 25% towards a secondary goal of, say, maintaining wildlife diversity. So what should farming subsidies be used for? Firstly, you would need to cut energy costs. A lot of food is produced in heated glasshouses, but because of rising energy costs many of these have simply shut down. The government should be aiming to achieve the opposite: an increase in heated glasshouse production, making the UK self-sufficient in fruit and vegetables from cucumbers to tomatoes and from aubergines to strawberries. The government should also be imaginative and pro-active, encouraging the building of glasshouses near facilities such as water works and power plants which produce hot water as a by-product and which could be used to provide the heat these need. This is the sort of energy-efficient, 'circular-economy' recycling that the government says it wants but doesn't, in practice, do anything to support.
Another example of how to turn a waste product into a valuable resource would be to use both human sewage and farmyard manure. Let me tell you an amusing story: in 1669 the German alchemist Hennig Brandt was trying to produce gold. Naturally, he decided that the best way of doing this would be to boil 1,000 gallons of piss. Pretty obvious, really, isn't it? Amazing nobody thought of it before. So you'll be disappointed to learn that, surprisingly, it didn't work (so don't try this at home!). He never did produce gold. But don't 'take the piss', because he did, however, produce phosphorus. And although this wasn't commercialised at the time, it was later used for all sorts of products, from matches to bombs - and here is where we return to farming – to fertiliser. Phosphorus is an essential fertiliser without which mankind would soon begin starving to death. I mentioned earlier that the Russia-Ukraine war has led to a trebling in the cost of fertiliser, as these two countries are among the world's largest producers of this vital resource, which is now produced by mining phosphate rock. Another large producer is China, not a particularly friendly country or one we want to have to rely on. And while other countries do also supply this, the fact is that phosphorus is a finite mineral resource, and some experts (though not all) estimate that we will soon begin to run short.
So we return to human and animal waste, which is a rich – and limitless! - source of phosphate. So why don't we use this as a source of fertiliser? In Germany they have, in fact, introduced a law requiring this to be done from 2029. Sadly, our retarded politicians are too stupid to think of this. It would be very straightforward to do, and the capital investment required in the UK to capture phosphorus from sewage is only about £1.6 billion, which is, frankly, peanuts. [As I mentioned in this brilliant (!) article which you just have to read: https://britishpatriot.substack.com/p/ive-got-news-for-you , the government is going to waste £20 billion on simply burying carbon underground, an utterly futile and nugatory action]. Farm manure can also be used for this. You may find this hard to believe, but British farms are actually restricted in how many cattle they can have, because too much manure is considered a pollutant. But a research institute in Northern Ireland has developed an anaerobic digester which converts manure into not just phosphorus, but also methane, which can be used as an energy source. An intelligent government would mandate that this be rolled out to farms nationwide, with suitable subsidies, giving them not only cheap fertiliser but also the ability to increase their herds and produce more food. But do we have an intelligent government? Sadly not. We have a bunch of Tory retards.
Innovation brings success
I began this article by talking about Brexit. One of the opportunities of Brexit which most excited me was the ability to free ourselves of the Luddite Brussels legislation which bans gene editing. So thrilling is the potential of gene editing that during the referendum debate I said that even if there were no other advantages to leaving the EU, the ability to adopt this technology was reason enough to choose independence. Gene editing has the ability to produce crops that are healthier, can be grown with less water, fertiliser, herbicides or pesticides, have a longer shelf-life, and taste better. Gene editing is a precise technique that only uses, or removes, the existing genes, rather than introducing extraneous ones, and so is to GM what a laser is to a blunderbuss. When used on farm animals it can make them healthier and give them better traits. The government promised to introduce gene editing after Brexit, but it took them over three years to get the Act through parliament, it still imposes all sorts of restrictions on this technology ... and it only applies to plants, not animals. This is a typical example of the half-heartedness of everything the government does. They are weak, cowardly and useless. No wonder people have given up on them.
Then there is vertical farming – another brilliant agricultural innovation, that allows plants to be grown indoors, all year-round, stacked up high in a controlled environment needing minimal water and no chemicals. It is super-efficient, growing on one acre of land what would need up to 20 acres out in the open, and is highly automated, needing very few staff. This amazing advanced farming was beginning to take off in the UK, with several large vertical farms built here – including Europe's largest - when energy prices went through the roof. The problem, you see, is that they use LED lighting, and so need electricity. Because they are so efficient that wasn't an issue when electricity prices were normal, but now these farms are uneconomic and closing down. So we come back to the need to reduce farmers' energy bills. This should be a government priority. Instead they push energy prices up higher through their carbon tariffs in order to meet their arbitrary and pointless net zero target. It is a criminal betrayal of British interests.
And the final area of modern, more productive farming the government should be promoting through their subsidies is robotics. There are several British startups, as well as university research departments, developing autonomous robots that can do everything from sowing to weeding to harvesting. We are constantly told that Brexit has led to a shortage of crop-pickers, and while it's true that it has made it more difficult for Eastern Europeans to come here for this, there is a seasonal work visa available for foreign farm workers. But the fact is that all advanced countries face a shortage of this type of worker, and the solution is not to try ever harder to attract these people to come here, but to mechanise the work with robots. This is not science fiction. They already exist, and with appropriate government investment could improve and become both faster and more versatile. There is a huge global market for these machines and if the government supported British companies developing them, and farmers using them, we could create not just the solution to our own problems but also a great export opportunity.
Conclusion
So there you have it – proof that leaving the EU has nothing to do with food inflation, or indeed any other problems that we face in the UK today, together with a strategy for a new agricultural revolution that will boost Britain's food production leading to more resilience, fewer imports, lower prices and better quality. What's not to like? It's just a pity that the morons in government won't do any of this!
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Excellent work yet again 'BP' thank you. I will inwardly absorb it later, but I couldn't resist this one because it was Herr Goebbels who said that, but he also said something much more relevant today, given the obfuscation by HMG/The Blob on the WhatsApp -Gate saga:
"“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”