Mr Alistair Carmichael

Mr Alistair Carmichael

Liberal Democrat — Orkney and Shetland

Speaking in the House of Commons on 11 September 2025

Debate

Biosecurity at the Border: Britain’s Illegal Meat Crisis

Contribution

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his contribution to the Committee’s work, which is—I hope the Whips are here to hear this—a textbook example of how a Government Back Bencher should go about his business in Committee. He is absolutely right that seeing scales was worrying. It is obvious that that product is then going straight to the market and goodness knows where after that. Our real concern is that we are bringing in pork products from eastern Europe and places where African swine fever is already present. A lot of that meat is, we suspect, destined for eastern European workers in our pig industry. One does not have to be Einstein to work out the scale and nature of the risk there. We heard two things. One of the witnesses said that we were one carelessly discarded ham sandwich away from disaster—that is absolutely right. The other thing that we were told was that the possibility of an outbreak of African swine fever could be the death knell for the British pork industry as a whole. To my mind, that really illustrates just how high the scale of risk is here.

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