The DUP are now opposed to everything - official

Well, we now know what the DUP’s position is on the Australian trade deal. They’re vehemently opposed to it. Agriculture minister and DUP leader elect Edwin Poots, has written to George Eustice to express "strong opposition" to a zero tariff, zero quota agreement, amid reports that the British government is poised to agree just such a deal with the Australians.  He says the deal "presents a high level of risk to Northern Ireland and UK farmers." 

The agricultural industry is just the latest 'victim' of Brexit.  If follows the fishing industry and finance. Next will be the steel industry as reports come in that the government has made a preliminary decision to remove tariffs on imports of a wide array of products including steel and which the steel industry has described as a “hammer blow” that risks damaging the sector long term.  No doubt we'll be hearing more about that very soon.

But back to Mr Poots. He will become first minister at Stormont when Arlene Foster steps down in June and at that point all three devolved administrations will be opposed to Brexit and the TCA. So, much for the union when policies are driven through in opposition to 3 out of the 4 members.

It’s hard to know what the DUP were thinking when they supported Brexit in 2016. It’s been all downhill for them ever since. They were against the status quo, against Theresa May’s deal and against Johnson’s withdrawal agreement and now his trade deal. I think they expected a concrete wall with frequent pill-boxes manned by the army to be built across Ireland to keep the Irish out. 

There was never any Brexit outcome that could ever have been acceptable to unionists but they were not only in favour of it, despite many warnings, they received and spent £425,000 on ads in London to get Brexit over the line. We still don’t know where that money came from.

No wonder ordinary unionists feel hard done by. They are led by simpletons and have been twice betrayed. A border down the Irish Sea and now their farmers look like they will suffer a flood of cheap imports. The sunlit uplands are still shrouded in thick fog as skies darken over Ulster.

 The Times editorial this week said this:

"Whatever the economic benefits of free trade, allowing another country’s exporters preferential access to your domestic market requires politically unpalatable trade-offs. There are always losers. Australia’s demand that Britain allow its farmers tariff and quota-free access to its market as the price of a new trade deal that Liz Truss, the international trade secretary, is eager to conclude ahead of the G7 summit next month is a case in point. Here the losers are likely to be British farmers, particularly hill farmers in Scotland and Wales, who will struggle to compete with low-cost Australian lamb."

How this is supposed to help the cohesion of the union I don’t know.

Julian Sturdy, MP for York outer, is a farmer and Brexiteer. He too must be feeling a sense of betrayal and perhaps even embarrassment at his own naivety and foolishness. In March 2027, he was asking and getting reassurance from then prime minister May that U.K. farming would “not become a sacrificial lamb in any future trade negotiations.”  Sturdy has supported Johnson throughout.

He is I believe a cereal farmer (but I may be wrong) and I don’t know how he might be impacted. I understand the sugar beet industry is in the firing line along with cattle and sheep farmers. But cereals may also be affected, I really don’t know.

What many fear is that a Rubicon has been crossed. The government is prepared to sacrifice anybody and anything to get more trade deals in order to try and justify Brexit. When it comes to the powerful USA agri-food lobby, nobody is expecting any prisoners to be taken.

Tariffs may be removed slowly over a few years but the end result will be the same. I would have thought many farmers will opt for early retirement. Farming as an industry will shrink and our reliance on food from overseas will rise.

Johnson talks of huge ‘opportunities’ for UK farming coming out of these trade deals but it’s hard to see what they could possibly be.

There is a good deal of criticism from people who understand these things that there is no coherent strategy or policy behind these decisions and Johnson is making them on a whim:

"Signing trade agreements before the UK knows what it wants" - this point keeps coming up.

Given that this time it's Prof Alan Winters himself, let's hope the UK Gov is listening. https://t.co/9TZgMu0BM3

— Dr Anna Jerzewska (@AnnaJerzewska) May 21, 2021

The letter referred to in the tweet is from Alan Winters to The Times. It talks of the PM's "timidity [preventing] both an informed national conversation about what post Brexit Britain will look like and the formation of a more methodical approach to making trade policy that involves legislators, stakeholders and the devolved administrations."

At the moment Johnson seems to be surviving because each sector is small enough by itself for him to throw it under a bus without too much backlash in the way of political support. He keeps talking about the export opportunities of Brexit but they are few and far between and will never be a substitute for lost EU trade. 

More importantly, a strong export performance requires strong domestic industries and one day Johnson is going to look round and discover there are none left.