Of all the scare stories pushed by Remoaners, the chlorine chicken saga is the daftest
ACOuPLE of weeks ago very few journalists at the BBC or anywhere else had heard about the American procedure of washing chicken in chlorine in order to kill off nasty bugs.
Now it has been firmly established in the view of Remainers that this habit is bad for chickens (although they are, at this juncture, safely dead) and consumers.
The spectre of chlorinated fowl finding their way on to British supermarket shelves has created panic in the anti-Brexit media. Alarm reached a high-water mark on Tuesday evening when Emily Maitlis of BBC2’ s Newsnight interviewed the Trade Secretary Liam Fox in Washington. Solemnity was etched into her features, and her questions were delivered with a portentous air.
In her mind — and the minds of other folk at the BBC — chlorinated chicken represents a major threat to post-Brexit Britain. There is even a suggestion that in order to keep this scourge away from our unsullied shores it might be better not to sign a deal with Trump’s America.
It is all fantastic nonsense, of course. Of all the groundless and far-fetched scare stories pumped out by the Remainer brigade over the past 18 months or so, this one should surely take the biscuit.
Dr Fox was not hopeless under assault from Emily. But he wasn’t great. He should have said that the u.S. is by a wide margin Britain’s biggest single trading partner, and that at the latest count Britain enjoys an annual trade surplus of almost £40 billion with our closest ally.
Moreover, although he had already rightly dismissed the chlorinated chicken issue as ‘a detail’, he might have rammed the point home by saying that the import of these supposedly noxious birds will probably account for a fraction of one per cent of uK-uS trade. HE
MIGHT also have invited the disconsolate Emily to celebrate the enthusiasm of President Donald Trump and leading members of his administration for a rapid deal with Britain. That must be a good thing.
Incidentally, would these metropolitan types be so distressed by the thought of washing chickens if Barack Obama were still president? I can’t help thinking that their horror of American poultry has somehow become associated with their conception of Trump as a great Satanic figure.
There are lots of other arguments which collectively drive a coach and horses through the contentions of the hysterical doom- mongers who are attempting to persuade us that an influx of chlorinated chickens is a national nightmare.
Let me first of all point out that America is a rich, wellregulated country. Her consumers are almost certainly even more pernickety and health- conscious than our own. They have been chomping into this stuff without any apparent ill effects.
Nor is it obvious that our Euapproved arrangements are perfect. Various surveys have found that some of our supermarket chickens are riddled with salmonella (the potentially deadly organism which chlorinating is designed to kill) and so anyone taking one of these birds home is running a risk.
I should add that the idea that our standards are higher than those of the allegedly sloppy Americans is pretty hard to swallow. Wasn’t Britain the cradle of BSE (mad cow disease) in the early Nineties?
This arose because cattle (which are herbivores) had been fed the remains of other cattle in meat and bone meal — a disgusting and unnatural practice. Let’s hope we have improved, but we’re hardly in any position to lecture the Americans about food safety.
The same point could be made of the Eu, whose officials have been treating Dr Fox as though he has been consorting with the enemy. But while Brussels regards u.S. chickens with such disfavour, it permits the import of sizeable quantities of the birds from Thailand.
Thailand — a semi-developed country with lower standards of hygiene than an advanced economy such as America — is a major exporter of chickens. A large proportion of these find their way to Europe, and a significant number to the uK.
If you have ever bought a chicken microwave meal, or ventured into an Indian, Chinese or Thai restaurant, it is highly likely that you have eaten a chicken that once upon a time clucked away in Thailand. The same holds true if you have bought a chicken sandwich in a High Street shop.
I do not want to cast aspersions on the chicken business in Thailand or drive any hardworking Thais out of business. But given the choice of being a chicken in the united States of America or in Thailand, I know which I would choose.
And I think it highly likely, if not practically certain, that standards of cleanliness are higher in America (even under President Trump) than they are in Thailand.
Yet while the BBC is convulsed with anxiety over washing chickens with chlorine in the u.S., it maintains a lofty lack of interest in the chicken business in Thailand, even though we consume its products.
Emily Maitlis, who will scoot over to Washington at the drop of a hat, is never to be found in Bangkok, picking her way among chicken coops, peering into battery farms, or indeed expressing any interest at all in the welfare of these possibly unfortunate birds. THE
explanation, of course, is that the outcry over chlorine is not really about chickens or the well- being of consumers. It is mainly another opportunity to spread panic over Brexit, of which there have been several other recent instances, as the Mail reported yesterday.
One bogus yarn was that leaving Euratom — the European Atomic Energy Community — could affect the transport of radioactive materials used in cancer treatment.
London’s Evening Standard, edited by anti-Brexit propagandist and former chancellor George Osborne, carried a front page headline which read: ‘CANCER PATIENTS IN BREXIT SCARE.’ The BBC made a great deal of fuss, too.
The truth is that Euratom regulates the distribution of fissile material used in nuclear energy, not radioactive isotopes used in cancer treatment. Moreover, lots of non-Eu countries have a close working relationship with Euratom.
Once one grasps the machinations behind these scare stories, it is easy to be amused. But many people will have been alarmed by the nonsense over cancer, as they will be by the suggestion that a lot of lethal chlorinated chickens are about to land on us.
By the way, Dr Fox might have pointed out that the water we drink contains minuscule quantities of chlorine. unless one gets into the habit of eating a couple of American chickens a day, one is likely to consume more chlorine from what comes out of the tap.
No one is saying that we are obliged to accept every American food import without demur. I’m a bit unsettled by the thought of GM crops. That said, Environment Secretary Michael Gove was unwise yesterday to say we wouldn’t accept chlorinated chicken. I’m afraid he’s playing to the gallery. Wouldn’t making it a requirement to label American chicken give consumers the protection they might seek?
The point, as Liam Fox says, is that these are details. Tiny details. We appear to be on the way to signing a crucial deal with our biggest trade partner and the world’s largest economy. It’s puerile and misleading to be banging on about chickens.