Nick Tegerdine 3.5% #FBPE

🇬🇧🇪🇺 Britain aligning food standards with the EU again. The ridiculous “Not for EU” labels may soon disappear and 👉 Britain can then begin to rebuild its food security 🇬🇧 🇪🇺 After years of arguing that Brexit meant escaping EU rules, Britain is now negotiating to align with them again to make trade easier, strengthen biosecurity and reconnect our food system with Europe. On 20 November, Britain and the EU are hoping to agree something genuinely significant. This could mean fewer physical border checks, the removal of costly veterinary export certificates and the beginning of dismantling the Brexit barriers we erected between ourselves and our largest, closest food market. The Government estimates the SPS deal could ultimately be worth up to £5.1 billion a year to the food and drink sector. Britain imports a substantial proportion of the food we eat. We cannot pretend our food system exists independently of Europe. And at a time of war, energy disruption, climate shocks and increasingly fragile global supply chains, putting barriers between Britain and the enormous food-producing region immediately beside us never made strategic sense. And EU alignment would mean Britain moving back towards European rules governing food safety, animal and plant health and imports from third countries. This matters when Britain has signed post-Brexit trade deals opening greater access to agricultural imports produced under different systems. Trade deals should not give anyone a legal right to sell unsafe food in Britain. But standards are only as good as the system that enforces them and since Brexit, we have had little control over imports.

🇬🇧🇪🇺 “Those of us who want to rejoin must now make the argument.” Rachel Reeves is no longer simply arguing for a better Brexit deal. She explicitly says: “I do believe Britain’s future lies in the European Union.” And: “Brexit has made us poorer, weaker and less secure.” She welcomes Andy Burnham’s leadership in reopening the debate and says supporters of re-entry must now demonstrate the tangible benefits and get the next steps right. The silence that has paralysed Westminster over Brexit has finally broken and polling shows support for rejoining the EU is a large growing majority. 🇬🇧🇪🇺