IS it the lot of Scots every day to feel anger, frustration and despair, as Jackson Carlaw daily jumps to the Westminster Tory tune? When they propose something detrimental to Scotland, and tell him to jump, is his only response always “how high?”
Has he looked at the implications of this most recent power grab on devolved powers relating to farming and food standards? We are all too aware that America has already set “red lines” which include the reduction of the standards and protections in question here. Has Jackson Carlaw actually looked at some of the details involved?
Much is said about chlorinated chicken. These poor birds are inhumanely treated in ways forbidden here. Other livestock suffer dreadful lives of captivity too. On pig farms, the US still pens sows so tightly that they cannot move, so that all the feeding goes into fattening, with none used by movement. Is that a humane life?
READ MORE: Mike Small: Tory Britain is facing a new era of hunger and food madness
In food processing, where we would not tolerate a “foreign body” in a jar of something like chutney, the US standard is that the number of maggots, for example, must not exceed one! Would Jackson Carlaw fancy finding a dead beetle or caterpillar in his onion relish?
In the USA, one in every six of the population is likely to suffer food poisoning. In the UK, it is one in 28. I wonder why! Yet the US has made it clear that to achieve a trade deal, we must match their standards, and since 50% of the American Senate represent farmers, there is no hope at all that they will budge on these. But then, they have no reason to. They are well aware that, having antagonised not only Europe but many countries around the world and voluntarily having given up all the free or favourable deals the EU made with them for us, the UK is desperate for the only quick deal now possible.
The suggestion that Holyrood might defy Westminster on this is our only possible protection and I hope they have the courage to do it, and pass legislation NOW making our current standards and source of food labelling permanent. It is time that we stood up and were counted.
L McGregor
Falkirk
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