adjustments by tightening or loosening the regulation. Having said this, any products we export to the EU will still need to comply with EU regulation, meaning that most farmers would continue to obey the same rules they do now. In 2015, 73% of our food and drink exports were to the EU. As this figure is so large, we’ll still be tightly bound by EU regulation regardless of whether we leave or remain. Leaving the EU would certainly result in a lower level of EU immigration, a fact accepted by Migration Watch, most political parties, and most MPs. This is particularly important for certain sections of the food market the majority of strawberry-pickers are from Romania and Bulgaria and are allowed to take up UK jobs due to the Free Movement of Workers EU policy. Although these types of jobs could become available should Britain leave the EU, according to Elaine Clarke, a strawberry farmer, “it has become impossible to get local people interested in fruit picking 1 ” So how easy would it be to fill jobs at the current wage level, which seemingly only EU immigrants are willing to accept? There is a growing amount of evidence suggesting that cheap labour is leading to a decrease in British workers’ pay. Could Britain leaving the EU lead to an increase in pay for the lowest pay bracket? Would this equally lead to further food price increases? For centuries the UK’s Parliament reveled in full-blown sovereignty granted by the ‘doctrine of Parliamentary sovereignty’ (that our uncodified constitution relies on), essentially meaning that Parliament is subject to any form of ‘higher law’ and can make and unmake any law. Some of this much-loved sovereignty was ceded to the European Union as a result of the landmark ‘Costa V ENEL’ case that was taken to the European Court of Justice. This case concluded that “member states have limited their sovereign rights… and have thus created a body of law which binds nationals and themselves.” It was reluctantly acknowledged under the leadership of Edward Heath in the 1972 European Communities Act. There is much debate as to whether EU legislation has significant/far-reaching impacts on the UK economically and whether the benefits of experiencing the Union’s legislation exceed the drawbacks. To quote Nigel Farage, does EU legislation concerning agriculture and a 500 million-consumer single market really render the EU a “Union of economic failure, of mass unemployment and of low growth?” Legislature in the UK must comply with regulations regarding agriculture. It has seen scathing criticism by many for not allowing farmers and growers to respond effectively to market forces. Even our current Conservative government committed the party to an attempt to reform this aspect of EU policy (Common Agricultural Policy 2 ) in their manifesto. At the moment, the current powers of the European Union to legislate in respect of agriculture are showcased in articles 38-44 of the TFEU (Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union 3 ). These articles establish that the EU must implement a ‘Common Agricultural Policy,’ thus extending the ‘Single Market’ to agriculture and trade in agricultural products. Although the articles in the TFEU extended the areas of agriculture and trade in agricultural products to the ‘Single Market’, the legislation also made the areas subject to a certain combination of rules that don’t apply to other products traded in the single market. These areas included regulation of pricing and supplementing the marketing and production process of agricultural products. __________________________________________________________________________________________ How has EU legislation concerning agriculture and the Single Market impacted the UK? M ICAH R OBERTS
1 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-36574769 - Graham Satchell (20/06/2016) 2 The Agricultural policy of the European Union that implements a system of agricultural subsidies, and other programs. 3 One of the Two primary treaties of the European Union (alongside the treaty on European Union), it states EU law and sets out the scope of the EU’s authority to legislate.
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