The Great British Brexit Mystery continues

It’s a new year, and time to turn over a new leaf. But if the latest musings of environment secretary Andrea Leadsom are anything to go by, it looks like the Great British Brexit Mystery will continue for some time to come.

Farmers hoping to hear some tangible detail on how their industry will operate post-Brexit would have been disappointed by what they heard from Leadsom at today’s Oxford Farming Conference.

Conference speeches of this ilk rarely let the policy cat out of the bag, and Ms Leadsom’s latest discourse stood firmly to that principle. It’s clear her hands are tied on what she can and can’t say about the future.

Short of a headline-grabbing hint that the controversial three-crop rule would be abandoned after Brexit, and a UKIP-esque suggestion the government planned to scrap regulations requiring farmers to pay for and display billboards to publicise EU grant support (isn’t that obvious?), there was very little substance to put food producers’ minds at rest.

Toeing the current government line of zero disclosure, Leadsom avoided the elephant in the room: how the UK food sector would access the single market post-Brexit.

Though thankfully she avoided making such cringeworthy promises as a “red, white and blue Brexit” (whatever that means) as her boss Theresa May had done before Christmas.

The reaction to Leadsom’s speech today were therefore decidedly lukewarm. Lib Dem environment spokeswoman Kate Parminter will have spoken for many when she bemoaned the distinct lack of detail on key policy questions: “With over two-thirds of UK food and drinks exports going to the EU, warm words about wanting to increase British food exports will be meaningless if farmers are faced with a 50% tariff on beef and a 30% tariff on lamb to sell into their biggest export market,” she said.

Not that such criticism will make a difference. The government has made clear it wants its politicians to talk a lot about Brexit without actually saying anything until Article 50 is triggered. Whether anyone is actually awake by then is another matter.