George Eustice hits back at farmers’ labour shortage claims

Pig farmers are protesting, joining the ranks of climate activists and Remainiac Steve Bray outside Conservative Party Conference. The Prime Minister’s seeming dismissal of the imminent cull of 120,000 pigs as ‘just what happens’, has riled up farmers across the country who say that the cull is a result of the same sort of labour shortages we’ve seen in petrol delivery and hospitality.

But today, the Secretary of State for Defra seemed to disagree with that analysis, blaming, instead, butchers who are importing cheaper pork from the continent. On a fringe panel on levelling up the rural economy, hosted by the think tank Onward, George Eustice suggested that processing plants were not being completely honest to blame a labour shortage:

‘Some of these processors are telling their farmers that they haven’t got the labour, but they are then importing large quantities of pork from eastern Europe, so they actually do have the labour to do the processing.