Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

What’s the worst business to be in right now? Sheep farming

What’s the very worst line of business you could be in, if we’re heading for a no-deal Brexit? Not finance, for sure: there’s a noticeable absence of squealing from the City, which has evidently made all the contingency plans it needs to continue making numbers dance on screens and booking the proceeds in convenient domiciles. Car manufacturing, on which I’ve written so much in recent weeks, clearly has its challenges — but the impediments of Brexit are no more than a tiresome sideshow compared to the industry’s wider technological and market issues. Fishing has been a bad career choice ever since we joined the Common Market and probably can’t get much worse. But the one thing you really wouldn’t want to be right now, I suggest, is a sheep farmer.

Let me précis a passage from Michael Gove’s speech to last week’s NFU conference, in which he expressed eloquent sympathy for farmers without offering any certainty as to the conditions under which they will operate beyond this month. ‘As things stand… there’s no absolute guarantee that we would be able to continue to export food to the EU,’ he warned. The EU says it will levy full external tariffs on all food: that means at least 40 per cent on sheep meat, of which 90 per cent of UK exports go to the EU, France in particular.

Other EU nations from Spain to Romania would rapidly muscle in on French demand, while New Zealand and Australia would still have tariff-free quotas for meat exports to the EU — but we would not. And if we’re still able to sell into the EU at all, our meat will go via Calais as at present, but will have to be thoroughly checked. The French promised some time ago to invest in the necessary inspection capacity, but ‘as I speak’, Gove went on, ‘there are no border inspection posts at Calais.

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