Commonwealth: Trade

Paul Beresford Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd February 2017 Westminster Hall

[Sir Paul Beresford (Mole Valley) (Con)]

I am delighted to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Rossendale and Darwen (Jake Berry) on securing this debate.

We talk freely about free trade and opening barriers. I have a couple of declarations to make. First, I belong to the National Farmers Union in this country. Secondly, as hon. Members can tell from my accent, I have a dual nationality: New Zealand and the UK. When we went into the Common Market, New Zealand’s trade with this country teetered from 90% to 50%. After an agreement by Holyoake, the Tory Prime Minister, it dwindled to 5%. Later, a New Zealand Prime Minister called Muldoon, whose politics were really Labour even though he was a Tory, built up barriers right across the country. He was a very difficult man and was renowned for the statement—I apologise to our antipodean colleague, the hon. Member for Edinburgh North and Leith (Deidre Brock)—that any New Zealander moving to Australia increases the IQ of both countries at a stroke. The barriers he introduced crippled the economy. We then had a Labour Government, who introduced what we in New Zealand called Rogernomics. They tore down barriers and told the whole of the agriculture industry, “No ties, no restrictions, no subsidies.”

I think of that when I look round my farms. We have a dairy farm in my area that is supposed to be big—it has 350 cows. We have sheep farms with perhaps 1,000 sheep, and some of those farms get 90% of their income from subsidies. If we are going for free trade, I think we are going to have to wake up. We are going to have to give our farmers—I am concentrating on farmers—the opportunity to wake up and do something before the avalanche arrives.

On the North Island of New Zealand, there are square miles of vineyards. I have the biggest vineyard in Europe in my constituency—it is going to have to wake up. We have got dairy farms, but they are nothing compared with the dairy farms I know of in New Zealand, where 1,500 to 2,500 cows are milked twice a day. The farm I came off in the middle of the South Island had 1,000 head of cattle, 1,000 head of deer and 23,000 lambing ewes—when they lambed we had 50,000 sheep. There is nothing to compete with that here. The size and power of that industry in New Zealand could shatter us because we are not ready.

I know we are keeping subsidies till 2020, but we need to be aware that while we are welcoming people in, we need to be braced for what is going to hit us. I hope that our NFU is going to wake up. It wished us to stay, but my farmers voted to leave. They are going to have to wake up, organise and be expeditiously more efficient than they are at the moment. I welcome the potential deals, but we must be warned.