Andy Burnham’s Brexit promises risk distracting the government from an approaching winter food and fuel crisis, two former Whitehall insiders have warned.
On Monday 12 October, the prime minister vowed to push for a Brexit reset at a UK-EU summit in Brussels next month, days after an Independent exclusive revealed that a 10-year plan for re-entry to the EU is being put to him.
He told MPs in the Commons that it would be a “dereliction of duty” for Britain to turn its back on the EU.
Nearly three-quarters of Labour voters are keen to see renegotiations in the next manifesto. But as temperatures begin to fall and defence secretary Wes Streeting urges households to start stockpiling, In The Room hosts Helen MacNamara and Cleo Watson ask whether Brexit is really the most pressing problem facing the government.
For one thing, Helen says, there is an immediacy problem.
“The day on which anybody in this country will actually feel any economic benefit from changing the EU deal is, at best, literally years away.
“There are some really, really tough decisions coming up this winter. Distracting a bunch of people in Whitehall, thinking ‘if only this was all different’, is not the right call.”
Those decisions include Britain’s increasingly precarious reliance on imported diesel, an approaching El Niño weather event, continuing global conflicts and the aftermath of one of the worst UK cereal and oilseed harvests on record.
The first alarms over food supplies were raised by FarmingUK in March, shortly after the first US air strikes on Iran. Since then, concern has only grown. On 5 October, a letter signed by more than 150 experts warned that Britain has “no plan” to feed the country in an emergency.
Cleo said farmers she knows are “really worried” about the impact of global conflict on supplies of diesel for agricultural equipment. But even without the disruption caused by war, Britain’s record-breaking hot summer has left farms entering winter in a more vulnerable position.
“The grass they cut and dried for their livestock for the winter, they’ve had to use over the summer because it was so dry. Lots of them have already used up a good deal of their winter feed.
“There’s a really critical moment coming up this winter when they potentially run out of forage for the animals, and it doesn’t feel like the adequate attention is being paid.”
Cleo compared the situation to the government’s early-release scheme for prisoners, calling it “another example of a problem going on in the background and the canaries in the coal mine are saying, ‘Tweet, tweet, we’ve got a problem here.’
“But until it’s front and centre, it’s not a priority for government.”
Helen suggested the issue may also point to a deeper problem with Burnham’s approach to government.
“I do think this is a problem we’re seeing repeatedly with Andy Burnham. He’s trying to manifest things that are gonna happen in the far-off future.”
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