How post-Brexit border controls have led to shocking influx of illegal, disease-ridden meat

Doing the hard yards to make reality match their rhetoric was another matter entirely. Their mishandling of border checks on food and other products is leaving a long and sorry legacy. This week the head of the Dover Port Health Authority, Lucy Manzano, told my Commons’ select committee that imported, illegal meat – potentially disease-ridden – is now available on “most high streets” in the UK.

If that is what being “tough” on borders looks like, then I would fear to see what the “light touch” approach would have been.

Stomach-churning evidence

I wrote earlier this year about the reappearance of foot-and-mouth disease in Germany, and the need to take this as a spur to reinvest in our biosecurity. These and other outbreaks in Europe in recent months have left farmers and health authorities worried about the threat they pose to our economy and our safety.

That is precisely why the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee launched an inquiry into whether the system is working as it is supposed to. The evidence we have so far suggests not. Photographs shown to us told their own grisly tale – I suspect that like myself, not many of the committee members looking at that evidence would have had much for lunch that day.

Under the current system, checks on commercial vehicles do not take place at Dover itself. Instead, drivers are ordered to travel 22 miles to a “border” control post at Sevington. I think you can see where this might be going – or indeed where those lorries are not going. Many lorries are simply failing to turn up for the checks, because they know there will be no enforcement.

Tory mess

This is, in large part, a problem we can lay at the feet of the previous Conservative government. Brexit was always going to be a mess but they exacerbated that mess with both the deal they negotiated – which left out an agreement on issues of this sort – and by kicking the can down the road, year after year, on implementing checks on the UK side of the border, despite the protests of our own food producers who were left at a disadvantage in trade.

We are where we are. Now we need to get where we need to be. A long-term solution must include striking a workable deal on ‘sanitary and phytosanitary’ border controls with the EU, like we had before Brexit. That would, at a stroke, remove the overwhelming majority of the problems.

More immediately, we have to get the current border system working properly. Funding for the border checks expires at the end of March and has yet to be renewed. Labour may not like the situation they’ve been left with but it would be the height of madness not to put that funding back in place. There is no good reason for them to delay making that commitment.

Tough talk is cheap – but cutting back on basic border checks would be a false economy.

Alistair Carmichael is the Scottish Liberal Democrat MP for Orkney and Shetland