Why the Remainers’ chicken scare won’t wash

CHLORINATED chicken, yes or no? Well, no actually, thank you for asking. A very big no to all cheap American foods, such as chlorinated chicken, beef from cattle implanted with hormones and genetically modified foods.

However, chlorinated chicken has been seized upon by remainers as a further example of the lunacy and inevitable evils of Brexit. More than ever, they cry, we need EU standards to protect us from the nightmare to come. The very fact that American farmers need to wash their hopeless chickadees in chlorine just shows the lax hygiene standards of these utter barbarians.

Here, our lovely, ruddy-cheeked farmers have worked for decades to stricter EU standards to provide consumers with safe, natural food. Well, some of them do.

But, i don’t imagine that chickens raised in giant factory farms in the back of beyond are a vast improvement on their American cousins. And aren’t we forgetting that the Food standards Agency recently reported that three out of four supermarket chickens sold in the Uk were infected with campylobacter, a dangerous food poisoning bug which affects 280,000 victims a year — killing 100 poor souls.

That is nothing to be proud of. Neither is the overuse of antibiotics in pig factory farms to stave off disease. Or the ongoing scandal of farmed salmon, which are misshapen and infected with lice. And it was only four years ago that the great horsemeat scandal revealed that horse DNA was found in frozen beefburgers sold in British supermarkets.

so please. Less of the hysteria. Let’s not use this for political capital and try to pretend that everything in our european garden is perfect. Donkey meat in our pies, salmonella in our eggs, bugs in our chicken? Don’t swallow the hype.