Brexit trade barriers have bumped up food prices - Yorkshire Post Letters

The London School of Economics found that Brexit trade barriers have bumped up UK food bills by six per cent, according to your front-page report (Food price increase is highest on record, May 2).

Clearly, this is at odds with what Leave voters were promised – lower food prices and less red tape. Little wonder then that many have concluded ‘this isn’t the Brexit I voted for’.

It also undermines one of the arguments of the diminishing number still willing to claim leaving the European Union was a good thing: that other countries are also suffering economically.

It’s true that some are. But why are things so much worse here than in most comparable countries? The differentiating factor is Brexit, of course.

And things are expected to get even worse when the Government introduces new border checks in October.

I expect you’ll get letters claiming that we need to ‘dig for victory’ and grow more food in Britain. But in a parliamentary debate last week, Leeds Central MP Hilary Benn shared an anecdote from a Kent fruit grower illustrating how Brexit has made such simplistic solutions more difficult, too.

The debate was organised when a petition on the Parliament website initiated by Leeds for Europe calling for a public inquiry into Brexit’s impact secured 100,000 signatures. It’s now approaching 200,000.

The Kent farmer told Mr Benn: “Last year, I couldn’t pick eight per cent of my crop because I could not find enough workers. Do you know what I am going to do this year? I am planting less crops and I am going to import more fruit from the rest of the world.”

Mr Benn added: “What a wonderful advert for British economic growth if that is the conclusion that farmer came to”.