The illegal meat timebomb ticking louder and louder but the government has cloth ears….

Have you ever heard of the Cassandra Syndrome? This derives from Greek mythology and refers to a situation where someone predicts a disaster or warns of a looming crisis, but their warnings are ignored or dismissed. I can’t think of a better way to describe what’s happening with the massive amounts of illegal meat now flooding into the UK.

And the warnings are not coming from a single source but from many; chiefly, the Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Certification Working Group – a body that you may not have heard of but whose collective membership represents sectors that contribute well over £100 billion annually to the UK economy.

Rachel Reeves, do you hear this? This group alerted the Minister for Sewage and Angry Farmers, aka Steve Reed, about this via an open letter soon after Labour came into power in August 2024.

If one reads the written evidence submitted by Dover Port Health Authority to the EFRA Inquiry on the topic, it’s crystal clear that Reed’s Department of Sewers and Angry Farmers, aka DEFRA, is hopelessly lost in terms of understanding the gravity of the situation, providing any degree of leadership or the resources needed to combat the growing crisis.

The warnings about the potential impact are both stark and serious. The possibility of bringing serious animal diseases such as African Swine Fever and Foot and Mouth, which would cause havoc socially and economically to the country, are real. But memories are short, especially in government. The last major disease outbreak in the UK back in 2001 caused by foot and mouth disease was estimated to have cost over £10 billion, which in today’s money would be nearly double that. Rachel Reeves, do I have your attention yet? Of course, we cannot ignore the enormous food safety issues that all this illegal meat brings with it. There are some reports of contraband entering the country in unrefrigerated vehicles, which is beyond worrying.

So we are now in 2025 and the problem is escalating. Already this year record amounts of illegal meat have been seized by the Dover Port Health Authority.  Their job is made unbelievably difficult due to the madness of placing the inspection post 22 miles, yes 22 miles, inland. This affords so much time and space for the dodgy meat to be unloaded and reloaded into other vehicles that won’t be checked. Then there is the other issue of resources. The inspection teams at Dover and other ports are not adequately staffed to allow even a fraction of lorries to be inspected once they arrive in the country. So the response from the Department of Sewers and Angry Farmers aka DEFRA? They are proposing to cut funding for food import sanitary checks at Dover by nearly 70 percent…..  and as a direct result, in the case of African Swine Fever, the UK Government is putting our entire farming industry at risk.

We all know, as we are often reminded, that the UK is in deep financial trouble due to the decisions and policies of a string of unbelievably bad Conservative governments. But failure to react to a looming crisis which has been shouted about from many rooftops isn’t just bad, it’s simply criminal. I talked with one highly knowledgeable industry insider and his summary of the situation came in three words: ‘It’s a mess’. My own three words of choice are ‘dysfunctional DEFRA dismay’.