If we leave without a deal what will happen to the supply of food in the UK

lalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalala

No one knows what will happen it is all conjecture

Precisely, Felice, and that's the problem!

We are about to leave, likely without a deal, the EU which is the world’s largest trading bloc, the second largest economy after the USA, is right on our doorstep and, to quote you 'no one knows what will happen'.

Isn't that just a titchy bit worrying?

growstuff
Lack off can mean without

I wasn't advocating that fish and chips were the ideal diet. The point I was making that during World War II, ministers bent over backwards to make sure fish and chips were one of the few foods that were never rationed. That was a quote not made up by me. Fish and chips were two of the few foods not subject to rationing because the government feared the dish was so embedded in the nation's culture that any limit would damage morale.

Every time I quote from research I've found, I'm being told it's not accurate yet I'm expected to believe research you've done.

I'm with evansgg too.

I do hope Day6 comments are read by all who've contributed here. growstuff and all.

I'll try to keep to my promise to myself this time. I will not comment on any postings that make reference to Brexit.

So would you have voted for what we actually went through evansgg just for the hell of it? There were good reasons during the war and even then people did wonder if it was worth it. This is not a war-time situation however much you like playing that it is. Where does calling those who try to listen to the facts from acceptable sources "gloom-mongers" get us? It just means people think even less of your ability to inform and tell us just why the balance to leave outweighs the problems we will face. Pretty much for every person who voted leave there is another who didn't and we have a right to ask you to justify what you are doing to us.

I totally appreciate that people have a different perspective on this but so many of the Brexiters seem to have a different perspective because they turn their back and chose not to become informed. That I don't understand.

"We can import food from America, Australia, New Zealand. . " Not until we have the trade agreements in place. The ones with tghe US are going to be heavily weighted in favour of them, not us.

""Even better we can grow our own. Make Britain self sufficient . . " I has been said elsewhere, and is a fact of life, that Britain does NOT have the capacity to grow or produce enough food to feed the population. We were not self-sufficient when the population was 44,320,000 (1942) , so how do you suggest we become so when the population is 66,993,715 (as of Sunday, August 4, 2019) - half as many again? How will you convince the entire population to change their eating habits radically overnight? How will farmers change their crops etc overnight? It takes 3 years from conception to crop - what do we eat in the meantime, and will everyone want to eat the crops when they do mature? Mangel wurzels, anyone?

EllanVannin has posted "I don't believe in Climate change. Catastrophes are usually man-made. Fortunately I'm not in the habit of making myself look silly."

Unfortunately EllanVannin this post has made you look very silly.

If catastrophes are usually man-made, and the world has just exprierenced the hottest month on record, and climatologists worldwide are virtually unanimous in ascribing global warming to human activity, how can you possibly say you don't believe in climate change without looking very silly indeed?

Varian- you just beat me to it - indeed. Very very silly, worse, nonsensical.

What "charmers" there are posting on here.

Incidentally, regarding fish and chips during the war...

I was curious enough to look this up, because my grandfather was involved with requisitioning trawlers during WW2 and I know that many of the bigger boats weren't used for fishing.

This is what Hansard says:

"Fish was not rationed, partly because the Ministry of Food couldn't find an effective way to ration it, given the underlying principle they followed that rationed items would only be those of which they could guarantee constant supply, and supply was governed by the natural scarcity of how many fishermen were willing to put out to sea with submarines lurking under them at any given time. Consequently, there were always very long queues outside fishmongers."

The War Cabinet papers at the National Archives have a statistical summary of the war presented to the cabinet in 1944. It says the following about fishing:
During the war two-thirds of the deep-sea trawler fleet and nearly three-quarters of the steam-drifter fleet have been requisitioned for naval purposes, as well as many of the motor vessels engaged in inshore fishing. As a result the total landings of fish of British taking on an average throughout the war has amounted to less than one-third of what it was in 1938.

Landings of Fish of British taking
Year - Thousand cwts*
1938 - 20,907
1939 - 15,687
1940 - 6,268
1941 - 4,904
1942 - 6,091
1943 - 6,175

So what that has to do with Brexit, I don't really know. However, it would appear from the facts that fish and chips weren't universally available during WW2. The British obviously weren't gorging themselves on fish and chips (chips maybe!)

I am really fed up with being called a “sore loser” and worse on Brexit threads. I voted to remain and when the result was to leave I was very disappointed not to mention worried. However - democracy dictates that I accepted the “will of the people” and accept it I did. At first. As time has gone on and the full implications of leaving without a deal became clearer I began to be very worried indeed. I read the political threads on GN every day but very rarely comment but I have been impressed by the clarity of the thinking of some posters and have learnt a lot from them. I have been equally unimpressed by quality of the argument from others. “I don't believe in it” equates to it doesn’t exist. A trace for AF can be done in my GP surgery equates to it can be done in any GP surgery. We survived rationing during WWII equates to we can survive anything. To all you remainers who are trying educate/change minds/inform, you are wasting your breath because even if all your “scaremongering” becomes reality they still won’t “believe in it”!!

Overthehills, I know (sigh). I try to remain rational and factual, but it's very trying.

I feel the same as you. When the result of the referendum was announced, I was disappointed, but I honestly thought I was missing something and there were good reasons people voted as they did and I accepted it.

Over the last three years, I really haven't seen/heard any compelling reasons and I've become increasingly frustrated and anxious about the future, especially for younger people. Even after 31 October, the country is going to take years to heal, because a really nasty underbelly has been revealed.

A US perspective from someone who knows all about international trade.:-

Larry Summers, a former US treasury secretary, , said on Tuesday that the US would agree only to a deal that weighed heavily in its favor.

^ "Britain has no leverage. Britain is desperate. Britain has nothing else. It needs an agreement very soon. When you have a desperate partner, that's when you strike the hardest bargain," he told the BBC Radio 4's "Today" program.^

"The last thing you do is quit a job before you look for your new one," he said.

^ "In the same way, establishing absolutely that as a matter of sacred principle you're leaving Europe has to be the worst way to give you leverage with any new potential partners."^

Summers added: "Britain has much less to give than Europe as a whole did, therefore less reason for the United States to make concessions. You make more concessions dealing with a wealthy man than you do dealing with a poor man." www.businessinsider.com/larry-summers-us-will-exploit-uk-in-post-brexit-trade-talks

Those of us who have been saying this for THREE YEARS are not scaremongers or sore losers peeved at the "temerity" of Brexiteers for wishing to leave the EU, we are appalled by the irresponsibility. Would you throw up a steady job to take your children busking with a begging bowl outside the US embassy for a living?

Great post, Elegran, I did hear that piece on the radio.

However, I have a feeling that those who voted leave will not even read or listen to such comment. They will have their fingers in ears and going la, la, la.

They know they have no argument for doing this to the UK but just don't care. They feel disaffected and everyone else has to suffer for them feeling dissatisfied, disgruntled, discontented, frustrated, and fed up even though they are destroying our country in the process.

Can someone explain to me why we will have a shortage of fruit & veg I.e. EU growers WON’T sell their produce to UK after Brexit?

They will sell it once we have a trade agreement with them to, under whatever conditions are agreed. Those conditions will most likely be less good than those we had when the whole of Europe traded as one, and will probably result in higher prices. Until the agreement is made, the sales might not happen. If import into the country requires a lot more paperwork than currently (currently it is about nil) there could be delays at the ports - and if shipments arrive from many different countries, alll needing their paperwork checked, there could definitely WILL be delays, which could be disastrous for perishable goods.

It is not just fruit and veg from the EU. Our imports from non-EU countries are currently under the trading rules negotiated with those countries when we were part of the EU trading group. So shipments from further away will be held up by paperwork too, and forming queues.

Thank you Elegran - understood.

Feel sorry for the French as according to some TV chefs over half of their moules come from the UK!!

Something else for the gillet jeunes to
protest about, not that these protests are being shown on MSM!!

One thing worth bearing in mind too Pantglas, is that although we will no longer be part of making the rules, we will have to abide by those made in the EU when we want to export.

I have just heard Sir Paul Nurse, Director of the Crick Institute talking about how difficult it is becoming to recruit the best scientists because Brexit has meant that we are losing our status in the world (and leaving hasn't actually happened yet!).

He was asked about whether we could be confident that drug trials would not be disrupted, that people would not see those treatments disrupted for lack of supplies knowing that what the government has done about supplies of medicines and flying in radioisotopes needed for cancer treatment.

He replied that he did not have confidence in that. He added that we are facing an utterly chaotic situation, a failure of statecraft and political leadership, which has lead to this almost war-time footing which has simply been driven by an ideology that doesn't understand the modern world.

He added that we should just look at what we have to put in place to have to deal with the chaos that the failure of political leadership lead us to. He suggested the fact that the interviewer was asking questions like that just underwrites the extraordinary situation that we are in.

It seems to me that the more expertise some has, like Nobel prize winner Sir Paul Nurse, the more appalled they are at the prospect of brexit, and the more likely it is that their warnings will be completely dismissed by the leavers as scaremongering.

Can someone explain to me why we will have a shortage of fruit & veg

If this adds anything to Elegran's explanation, Pantglas I have found these two articles which go into a bit of detail:

www.nbcnews.com/storyline/brexit-referendum/britain-faces-looming-brexit-gridlock-port-dover-n905296

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-ports-customs-union-u-turn-rotterdam-eu-trade-single-market-theresa-may-david-davis-a8303436.html

(elderly, but still relevant, I think)

(elderly, but still relevant, I think)

A bit like some of us then Maizie

It's been a psychological triumph to persuade people that "experts" don't know what they're talking about.

Growstuff That has been happening more and more since the growing power of the internet.

Once upon a time, the general public didn't hear about tests and trials of new drugs, dietary theories and so on, until after they had been filtered through those who knew a lot about the subject and/or were actually going to use them. By then the more extreme had been proved or disproved by further studies and tests, and a more balanced view of them had emerged.

Graduation theses, written up by students on the results of the experiments they had been conducting during their underrgraduate or PhD years, were solely for the eyes of their professors, who gave them pass or fail marks as much on HOW they had gone about studying the subject as on how useful the result was, or even whether it stood up to further testing.

Now everyone puts a copy of everything on the net, at once, as soon as the last word is typed. We see these all the time on GN - someone comes across a degree thesis by someone on some obscure bit of science, and we all read it and get apoplectic at the nonsense it seems to be proposing.

Instead of finding out WHO wrote it and WHY, and WHAT knowledge and HOW MUCH experience do they have, some people react by saying "Yet another expert who is up their own exhaust pipe and talking rubbish! They are all paid to say what their employers want!"

Oh yes! I've read some of the Daily Mail health scare stories too. I would actually hope that my own education and experience would enable me to differentiate between the half-baked and the research with some validity. But - hey - what do I know? Try to tell people that there's a real risk of something happening or most evidence points in a certain direction and one is dismissed as only an "expert" trying to appear "superior".