Fenland resident gives views on EU and Brexit

In bigging up the EU I think Pam Thompson is a little guilty of what she accuses Ashley Smith of being when he condemned the EU in his letter.

I’ll accede though to the cleaner beaches, and Germany has got rid of coal fired power stations.

I never buy any meat product that says made in the EU or made in the UK using EU pork or chicken or whatever.

Two reasons – I don’t trust the suppliers as the horse meat scandal is not just a one-off; animal welfare standards in the EU are lower than here (in some countries very much lower) and the catch-all term ‘EU’ can mean the meat could be anything from anywhere).

Denmark, for example, keeps virtually all of its pigs indoors in pens all year.

Just up the road from us in Norfolk you can find pigs roaming fields, with outdoor shelters provided through spring to autumn.

At present Danish fishermen are busy stripping the food from the sea around a nesting site for an endangered sea bird taking as much as they can now for fear of Brexit.

A report in the Sunday Times on July 22, 2018, informed us that ‘Puffins and other seabirds are unable to feed their young after Danish vessels stripped British waters of sand eels worth up to £80m. The Danes… persuaded the EU to let them increase their annual take from 82,000 to 458,000 tons a year. Most of the catch, taken around Dogger Bank in the North Sea, was crushed into fishmeal for Denmark’s intensive salmon, mink and livestock farms’.

So much for Pam Thompson’s suggestion that EU quotas protect fish.

We have also been told of a Lithuanian super trawler (banned by Australia) doing something similar in The Channel.

These are just two examples of how the EU allows other member states to take advantage of the UK. It would need the whole letters page to list the rest.

As to the price of EEC butter being half the price of British butter back in the 1970’s, that I think is a ‘mis-memory’ by Pam Thompson.

I voted against staying in the EEC in 1975 because of the effect staying would have on just such things as the price of butter.

I expect the shop she got her cheap butter in was selling off UK stock before the CAP kicked in.

If you are not aware of the difference between our deficiency payments system and the Common Agricultural Policy then here goes.

The government here compensated farmers for their loss of income when market prices were low, hence the term deficiency payments. Thus we got cheaper food subsidised out of taxes.

In contrast the CAP from the Common Market bought up stock, if prices looked like falling, to reduce market supply and keep the price high for farmers. The surplus was put in storage.

Thus we ended up paying twice for the food we bought – a high price for food out of our purses and wallets and a high price through our taxes buying the food that went into storage.

The EU ended up with butter mountains and dried milk mountains, eventually selling this food on to Third World countries at a very cheap price and at the same time destroying the livelihoods of the farmers in those countries.

By the way they still have tariff barriers that make it hard for those countries to sell into our markets.

The EU is not nice people!

David Silver,

via email.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Correspondence on this particular element is now closed.

Food banks: Question for candidates

More people than ever are being forced to turn to food banks according to the anti-poverty campaign the Trussell Trust.

The trust, which runs two-thirds of the UK’s food banks, said it distributed a record 823,145 food parcels between April and September, including 301,653 that went to children.

The statistics, which come in the run-up to the December 12 general election, have also thrust the issue of hunger into the election campaign.

The Trussell Trust calls on politicians of all parties to pledge to protect people from hunger.

It is demanding an end to the five-week wait for universal credit payments, a commitment to ensure benefit payments cover the basic costs of living, and investment in emergency support for people in crisis.

As someone who has yet to decide who I’ll be voting for, it would be interesting to learn what the candidates for the North East Cambridgeshire seat are going to do about the growing use of food banks in Fenland?

John Smithee,

Wisbech.