A new report claiming to represent whistleblowers in the UK food industry has sent nervous ripples through the sector. But beneath the veneer of professional concern and carefully calibrated language lies something rather more troubling: an ideologically-driven agenda which threatens the very foundations of British farming, the competitiveness of our food industry and, ultimately, consumer choice.
The document, titled ‘An Insiders’ Guide to Meat and Dairy’, purports to come from senior professionals within major UK food companies. Yet its contents read less like genuine industry concerns and more like a carefully crafted activist manifesto designed to push government intervention in service of predetermined conclusions about meat and dairy consumption.
Let’s address the real beef first: it is not against the law for businesses to make a profit. Indeed, profitable food businesses are essential for food security, enabling investment in better practices, innovation, and resilience against shocks.
The report’s hand-wringing about retailers using affordable meat as a footfall driver while making margins elsewhere is simply how competitive retail works.
The cost of doing business
Supermarkets operate on notoriously thin margins – typically between 2%-3% – and use various pricing strategies to remain competitive while keeping food affordable for consumers. This isn’t a scandal; it’s basic retail economics which benefits shoppers during a cost of living crisis.
What the report conveniently ignores is the relentless regulatory and cost burden that has been heaped upon UK food producers, processors, and retailers, and often at the behest of the very activist groups whose language permeates this document.
Consider the facts: UK farmers and food businesses face some of the highest environmental standards in the world. They’re dealing with spiralling energy costs driven by net zero policies, increased National Insurance contributions, rising agricultural property taxes, and unprecedented regulatory complexity post-Brexit.
When you systematically drive up the cost of doing business through regulation and taxation, while simultaneously demanding lower prices and higher welfare standards, something has to give. The report bemoans intensive production methods, ignoring that regulatory and cost pressures often make extensive, high-welfare farming economically unviable for many producers.
Market manipulation
The language and framing of this report should raise serious questions about its true origins and intent. Terms like “meat primacy”, complaints about “personal bias” toward meat among food leaders, and the focus on “collective action” and government intervention to override competition law are straight from the activist playbook.
The report explicitly calls for government to facilitate “cartel-like behaviour” among food companies to co-ordinate reduction in meat and dairy, essentially asking for state-sanctioned market manipulation. It demands public funding for farmers to “transition away” from livestock farming, regulatory frameworks around advertising and labelling, and a national food strategy – which is due to be rolled out next year – to determine what constitutes acceptable dietary patterns.
And contrary to their covert claim, this is not the language of industry professionals seeking practical solutions. This is the language of activist food organisations and other anti-livestock campaigning groups, which have long pushed for radical transformation of the food system, increased adoption of plant-based diets, and wholesale change in the business of food.
The anonymous nature of the group makes it impossible to verify whether these are genuinely senior food industry executives or activist infiltrators. Or even activists who have deliberately sought positions in food companies to push their agenda from within.
Despite protestations that the group values farmers and recognises meat’s role in balanced diets, the trajectory is clear. Every demand points toward greater state control, reduced consumer choice, and the gradual elimination of affordable meat and dairy from British diets. The report’s vision includes government co-ordinated reduction in meat and dairy production, regulatory restrictions on advertising and marketing, and financial penalties through taxation and reduced subsidies for livestock farming. It calls for preferential treatment for plant-based alternatives and public health campaigns discouraging meat consumption.
This is the thin end of a wedge which won’t stop until private enterprise in meat and dairy is taxed, regulated, and campaigned out of existence, replaced by state-directed food production focused on plant-based proteins. The social justice framing – concerns about “health inequalities” and “poorer communities” – is particularly cynical, given that affordable meat provides essential nutrients that are either absent or less bioavailable in plant-based alternatives.
Support British farmers
We need only look at the chaos in the Netherlands, where activist-driven policies have triggered farmers’ protests and economic disruption, or Canada’s controversial fertiliser reduction targets, to see where this ideology leads when implemented.
British farmers already produce some of the most sustainable livestock in the world. UK beef and lamb have approximately half the carbon footprint of the global average. Our animal welfare standards are among the highest internationally. British food companies have invested billions in sustainability, innovation, and higher standards.
Rather than celebrating this achievement and supporting British farmers and food businesses to continue improving, this report seeks to undermine public confidence, push for radical intervention, and advance an ideological agenda that serves activists’ goals rather than farmers’ livelihoods, business sustainability, or consumers’ interests.
Of course, continuous improvement in sustainability, welfare, and health outcomes is important. But this must be done through practical, evidence-based measures which support viable businesses and consumer choice, not through activist-driven campaigns for state control.
We should be supporting British farmers to continue their world-leading sustainability improvements, celebrating the nutritional value of meat and dairy, and ensuring food remains affordable while maintaining high standards.
What we must resist is allowing activist organisations, masquerading as concerned insiders, to dictate food policy based on ideology rather than evidence, economics, or the real-world needs of farmers, businesses, and consumers. British agriculture and the food industry deserve better than this Trojan horse of faux concern concealing a radical anti-meat agenda.
The question is not whether food companies care about sustainability and health. The question is whether it’s right that activist pressure groups should be allowed to hijack the conversation and push policies which will devastate British farming, reduce consumer choice, and ultimately make food less affordable for the very “poorer communities” they claim to champion.
Mike Coppen-Gardner is the founder and chief executive of SPQR
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