No, the Brexit reset won’t kill smoky bacon crisps

This adds up to a “smoky bacon surrender” by Keir Starmer, apparently. Boris would be proud.

Delve deeper into Crisp’s story and it turns out that those nasty eurocrats have banned some smoky food flavourings because they contain substances that can damage human DNA, potentially causing cancer. Because kow-towing Britain decided to knock down Brexit barriers that have damaged the UK food trade, we now have to go along with the ruling rather than exercising our sovereignty and allowing Brits to proudly go it alone, damaging their own DNA and potentially getting cancer. How does Starmer sleep at night?

This really is it. The thinnest of gruel – so thin it is transparent – from what used to be a paper of record.

Crisp has lined all the usual suspects up to be outraged about this non-story, and guess what? They are foomin’.

Let’s give Nigel Farage the benefit of the doubt and accept that his fury over the state of our smoky bacon crisps is genuine. But surely even he sees that he sounds utterly ridiculous when he tells Crisp, “this genuinely is what sovereignty is all about…. it points to the fact that this government has no respect for Brexit voters.” 

I reckon most of us think that sovereignty is about slightly more than smoky bacon crisps. But maybe it is us who are wrong. Maybe this is an Agincourt moment, a new Battle of Britain. Or maybe it is performative nonsense from the master of it.

And maybe the government has enough respect for Brexit voters to not want them to get cancer? “You have to ask what next?” says Farage. The answer to that is that you phone up Mark Francois.

The Rayleigh & Wickford MP (who regrettably survived the election with his seat and his own daft opinions intact) told Crisp: “This is a salt and vinegar surrender”. No, Mark, it is a smoky bacon surrender – that’s the headline and the whole story for pity’s sake. No wonder Reform are beating the Tories these days.

I suppose we should be grateful Francois didn’t call it a “woke surrender to organic sea salt and cider vinegar, handmade, artisan crisps” but perhaps that is for less serious politicians, like Kemi Badenoch.
  

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At least Richard Holden, who as Tory chairman at the last general election was the architect of one of the most successful (for Labour) campaigns of all time, tried a bit harder. Holden, who is now shadow paymaster general, said: “We won’t let Labour fritter away our freedoms – we’ll fight this at every step.”

Nice try Richard, but fritters are not crisps. Still, he and Francois both managed not to call for the end of all “foreign flavourings” and an immediate return to “British crisps” –  the ones with the little Tory blue packet of salt in them. 

After wading through many paragraphs of this guff in Crisp’s story, you get to the relevant facts. The government quite rightly tells him that British food and drink exports fell by a third after Boris’s Brexit deal and this sort of sensible coordination of food standards is good for the economy and an attempt to win back lost sales. Then there is an admission that the crisp industry has had two years to change its smoky bacon flavouring chemicals because of what the Telegraph clearly sees as flippant concerns that the current ones are potentially cancerous.

Farage says Brussels is being too cautious, and “with the EU’s precautionary principle, we would not leave the front door in the morning”. Not leaving the front door in the morning is a strategy most of us would endorse were it applied to Nigel Farage.

Does the Potato Processors Association join him in being up in arms at this unprecedented attack on Brexit freedoms? Er, no.

They tell James Crisp: “Most of our members already supply both the EU and UK markets and they have therefore adapted to EU requirements by reformulating their products accordingly.”  Please don’t tell Richard Holden, who wants to fight this “at every step”.

In fact, the industry is so ahead of the story that Frazzles and Walkers Smoky Bacon solved this crisis in 2023 by changing their recipe, quietly and with no hassle or problem whatsoever, or anyone noticing – not even Mr Francois, who one feels may have hands-on experience of the art of crisp tasting.

The Telegraph’s “smoky bacon surrender” article therefore shows that the so-called surrender has nothing to do with the Brexit reset, or the government, or Sir Keir Starmer, happened two years ago without incident and was not a surrender in the first place. It shows what Farage, Francois and all the rest have never quite come to terms with – the food industry, like other British industries, is happy to follow EU rules because that allows them to continue to sell in the EU. That’s it. That’s the story.

The truth will out, which, I seem to remember, was what used to happen every time Boris Johnson wrote from Brussels all those years ago. Yet despite years of nonsensical claims that exploded on any contact with reality, he went on to be PM of this great nation.

So keep it up “Crispy” – a great future awaits!