“Your govt have ensured British farming is in crisis! You’ve allowed foreign imports to crush British food, removed our Labour supply and subsidies, put trade barriers in the way and paid us to plant flowers!” Liz Webster, founder of Save British Farming, said.
“Babe wake up the Brits are starting a Swadeshi movement,” a reaction post on X went viral.
“Why did you make it harder for farmers to supply it then, genius?” a user replied.
“I thought you were addicted to Coke? Do you buy solely, artisan, organic British cola?” a third social media user asked Sunak.
Food critic Jay Rayner posted “Where to bloody start? There isn’t enough British food to buy because the crass, malformed, malignant clown-show of Brexit that you promoted, has undermined food production, courtesy of ill-thought out subsidies. Plus, brexit-driven border controls have stymied imports.”
In response, someone joked: “Love to start the day with a cup of British tea or coffee. Little squeeze of British lemon juice and a drizzle of British olive oil over my lunch before flavouring my dinner with all those British spices…”
The harshest of jibes came from Indians who mocked Rishi Sunak for rediscovering Mahatma Gandhi’s ‘Swadeshi’ movement.
A report last year by the London School of Economics (LSE) revealed that British households have paid a staggering £7bn since Brexit to cover the extra cost of trade barriers on food imports from the EU. The researchers reported that trade barriers are consistently hampering imports, hiking up bills by an average £250 during the cost of living crisis.
A 2023 survey by Farmer’s Weekly caught the mood of British farmers seven years on from Brexit. It found that some 70% of the farmers who grow cereals said leaving the EU had been negative for their businesses, while 76% of oilseed rape growers felt that way. Similarly, 68% of farmers with beef cattle, dairy cows or sheep had a negative perception. And the two sectors that were even more negative were those growing vegetables (81%) and those keeping pigs (79%).
