White House pushing Sir Keir Starmer to make concessions on food standards

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/40891725

White House pushing Sir Keir Starmer to make concessions on food standards

Donald Trump is demanding American chlorinated chicken be sold in British supermarkets.

The White House is pushing Sir Keir Starmer to make concessions on food standards in order to revive a transatlantic tech partnership that drastically collapsed on Tuesday.

Jamieson Greer, the US trade envoy, wants Britain to accept hormone-treated chicken and beef, a term he was not able to achieve when the wider US-UK trade deal was first signed in May.

“He is seeking to use the tech partnership as leverage on trade deal concessions he still wants but that didn’t get the first round,” a source close to the negotiations told The Telegraph.

The US pulled the tech prosperity agreement over complaints Britain’s Online Safety Act would police American AI companies. Washington is using this complaint in order to secure fresh compromises in its trade deal with London, The Telegraph understands.

Insiders say the tech agreement collapsed in part because of the absence of an ambassador to Washington, a post which has remained vacant since Lord Mandelson was fired in September over his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.

  • mycodesucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
    53·
    8 hours ago

    This was the promise of Brexit - no more of those pesky, overbearing EU safety regulations in exchange for trading deals with the devil for bad products that don’t come CLOSE to replacing what was lost.

    • phutatorius@lemmy.zipEnglish
      3·
      49 minutes ago

      That’s it: a license for greedy manufacturers and farmers to sell us dangerous shite that used to be banned.

  • Obinice@lemmy.worldEnglish
    27·
    8 hours ago

    America has been trying to get us to legalise their shitty chicken for years, fuck right off. We produce our own locally to a much higher standard.

    I’ll buy your Good & Plenty though, my gawd that tastes goooood

    • Schal330@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      5 hours ago

      I’m not advocating for American chlorinated chicken, but I’m not sure our chicken is to a much higher standard. Over the last few years I’ve noticed a decline in the quality of our chicken from white striping to woody breast. I guess this is caused by them using breeds that grow quickly.

      • nogooduser@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        1 hour ago

        Wait. No. That can’t be right.

        We were supposed to be able to get much better deals when we could negotiate our own. /s

        Honestly, I don’t understand how anyone fell for that line. How can a single country have more negotiating power than 28 countries including that single country?

        • phutatorius@lemmy.zipEnglish
          1·
          46 minutes ago

          Yeah, your pricing power is far greater when you’re smaller, duh.

          Perfect example: any individual negotiating with a giant multinational.

    • Soggy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      52·
      5 hours ago

      Only a small portion of US chicken gets the chlorine rinse, a practice that the EU recognized as perfectly safe by the way. They banned it because they didn’t want poultry processors to get lazy about other hygiene practices. They don’t import American chicken because the cost difference would destroy the local farms.

      • phutatorius@lemmy.zipEnglish
        2·
        47 minutes ago

        They banned it because they didn’t want poultry processors to get lazy about other hygiene practices.

        It’s often used to conceal the fact that the chicken is riddled with e. coli.

  • potatopotato@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    62·
    10 hours ago

    IIRC it’s not just hormones it’s bleached because we consider chicken with salmonella to still be fit for consumption. Our farming processes are so bad that we have to bleach the chicken to attempt to mitigate the hearth hazard.

    • nul9o9@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      321·
      10 hours ago

      It’s honestly embarrassing. Every time I hear about an ecoli outbreak on leafy greens, I’m bewildered on how hard it is for our farmers to keep cow shit out of their crops.

    • Soggy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      34·
      4 hours ago

      The USDA has banned hormones and steroids since the 50s and like 5% of chicken gets the (perfectly safe) chlorine rinse. European countries use the same rinse on leafy vegetables, they just banned it on poultry because they thought it would make processors complacent.

    • BodyPower@lemmy.worldEnglish
      411·
      7 hours ago

      Is it because they think black people like chicken, so they make the chicken bad?

      • phutatorius@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1·
        44 minutes ago

        It’s because there’s a race to the bottom where US states try to attract high-volume chicken “farms” by not regulating them. A perfect example is Tyson in Arkansas.

      • OwlPaste@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        56 minutes ago

        Except that’s not how it works in UK, you have to list the country of origin on the packaging and if that somehow gets repealed, you still have local suppliers who actually tell you from which farm items come from that you can verify yourself.

        yes there are ways around alot of this, but they take time to implement and those of us who care will find a way to avoid. Which i fully intend to.