“Farmers’ anger grows as Australian beef floods into Britain”, ran a headline in the Daily Telegraph last week as it emerged that imports from the country rose by more than 80 per cent in the first nine months of 2025, following the implementation of a 2021 trade deal between the two countries.
The paper quoted David Barton, a cattle farmer who chairs the National Farmers’ Union livestock board, who said: “Increased meat imports are landing at a time when our domestic livestock farmers are already under significant strain from a challenging dry season. They need the confidence to produce British beef, which this undermines.”
Happily for the paper, Barton was willing to lay the blame squarely at Labour’s door, saying: “The problem is that the government seems to be quite happy with cheap imports that are not, perhaps, produced to the same standards or production methods that would be legal in the UK.”
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Neither Barton nor the Telegraph criticised the newspaper which went to great lengths to defend the Australian trade deal negotiated and signed by Liz Truss in her period as trade secretary, despite pretty much everyone else at the time warning it would have exactly the effects the Telegraph is now bemoaning.
It was widely reported at the time that the deal would allow a flood of cheaper food to enter the country, not least by Jonty Bloom of this parish, who wrote: “The Australian deal allows beef, lamb, dairy products and sugar almost unlimited tariff- and quota-free access to the UK market within the next five to eight years. There is no way that domestic producers can compete against the much larger and cheaper Australian farms.”
But one paper poo-pooed such claims relentlessly, running such headlines as ‘Australia trade agreement expected to offer numerous opportunities to British exporters’, ‘Don’t be fooled by Remainers, the Australia trade deal is better than anything we had in the EU’, ‘Having signed the trade deal with Australia, Global Britain is just getting started’ and ‘Naysayers of post-Brexit trade deals are missing the point’.
That paper, of course, was the Daily Telegraph.
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