I was interested to read that Britain imports 1 million litres of fresh milk a day from Holland, Belgium and Northern Ireland. 

Alarmingly, 2 British dairy farmers every day go out of business. 

At this point many will jump up and say it’s a good thing.  Let the market decide.  Why should the British consumer be penalised by our inefficient farmers? 

After all, when it was cheaper to import coal from Poland than subsidise our own miners, yes mining communities suffered as they made the transition into call centres, but working in a call centre is much cleaner and safer than working down a pit, so they all lived happily ever after (at least until their call centre job was outsourced offshore). 

But I don’t like to blindly follow political ideology’s, particularly not thatcherism, without asking a few pertinant questions. 

Now I can understand it being cheaper to import coal from Poland, as (particularly back in the 80s) wages are low in Poland and they will put up with working conditions that we won’t put up with (at least for now). 

But wages in Northern Ireland, Belgium and Holland aren’t that much lower than in the UK, so how can they provide milk more cheaply, especially when you consider the extra transportation costs? 

If it really is cheaper then we need to find out why, and do something about it. 

But reading on, “one major cheese maker has already announced it is cutting a tenth of its staff because it cannot afford the more expensive imported milk. “

The plot, like whipped double-cream, thickens! 

Lets get this straight, for the sake of short-term discounts, the supermarkets bully our dairy farmers into lowering their prices to the point where they can no longer make a living, then when supply becomes scarce, they pay a premium to overseas farmers to bring us milk that’s travelled hundreds of miles more than it needed to, and before long prices will go up as overseas farmers with a healthy domestic market won’t be so easily bullied. 

This is exactly what is wrong with pure unregulated free-market economics. 

Without a responsible government standing between the supermarkets and the dairy farmers to ensure both parties get a fair sustainable deal, we will continue to lose dairy farmers until there are none left  (‘cept maybe Michael Eavis who has a nice little side line). 

This is neither in consumers interests (prices will go up) nor in the countries as a whole (balance of trade). 

Yet more money draining out of the economy to import something we could easily produce ourselves, money that could be used for something useful, such as ahem propping up the banks.