Sausage Sanctions! Could The EU Really Get Any Wurst?

‘The EU preaches free trade yet does everything it can to obstruct it’

- Ross Clark

If anyone needed reminding of the petty-minded, bureaucratic attitude that led Britain to leave the EU, “sausage wars” provides a perfect example. Only the EU could dream up a system that banned the movement of certain foods between two halves of the same nation, subjected the transport of other goods to impractical levels of checks – and claim that by doing so it was promoting peace and prosperity.

But then that’s the nature of the EU beast, which preaches free trade yet does everything it can to obstruct it. If the Northern Ireland Protocol is causing misery for supermarkets and shoppers alike, that is because it was meant to.

It was part of the EU’s grand scheme to punish us for having the temerity to leave and to try to ensure no other country would dare hold a referendum.

Even more so, it was a trap set with the intention of trying to keep us within the EU’s regulatory orbit forever after.

Sign up to EU food standards in your internal markets, it offers, and you can keep sending sausages to Belfast. But that, of course, would undermine our purpose for leaving – to regain control of our own laws.

It is no credit to Boris Johnson and our Brexit negotiators that they ever agreed to the Northern Irish protocol.