Chlorine-washed chicken (which UK might take under a post-Brexit trade deal with the US) is not about chlorinated chicken. It’s about power.
At the moment, you don’t eat chlorine-washed chicken, because the UK as part of the EU has said that it doesn’t want to allow it to be sold.
I don’t know whether the UK was outvoted on chlorine-washed chicken but I bet it wasn’t because it hardly ever is. In fact, it usually plays
a big part in negotiations (well, until last year). Now, or soon, we are FREE! We can eat chlorine-washed chicken or not, hurrah!
Except – what if we don’t? What if the UK public don’t like the idea? What if they are happy with the status quo? Well, you could try
telling the Government, but they are busy making a trade deal with the US as fast as they can, and if the US says they want us to have
chlorine-washed chicken in return for some other perk, that will be traded away by the government you may or may not have voted for.
That’s what “taking back control” means. It means that the government can negotiate things on your behalf with distant trade bureaucracies.
Which is exactly what it used to do, except now we have to hire the negotiators ourselves and our hand is much weaker because our market is
much smaller. But we’ll be a bit more agile, because we don’t have to deal with countries that (a) really don’t want chlorinated chicken and
(b) are not screamingly desperate for a trade deal. So if in a couple of years your CTM and pilau rice tastes a bit municipal swimming pool
you will know that its the taste of freedom.
Originally posted as a thread of 12 tweets on Twitter on 24 July 2017. View the original thread.