Friday 9 November 2018

Angles




Here's a comment from Biased BBC this morning:

Gammon
Listening to R4 this morning. UK STOCKPILING FOOD.
They had a man on who owns a massive refrigeration facility here in the UK. Because of UK STOCKPILING FOOD he has sold all his space for Q1 2019. Because of BREXIT…. the UK IS STOCKPILING FOOD.
Who is buying he space? Oh says the chap – EU FOOD PRODUCERS…. why? Because THEY are worried about borders and selling their EU food into the UK.
So the story is EU STOCKPILING FOOD TO SELL IN THE UK
The story is that EU NEED AND WANT SMOOTH TRADE as much as we do
But no – BBC focus on UK STOCKPILING FOOD and no interest in the real story or getting behind the headline
This made me question if this was Bias or just media always looking to stir things up and create conflict where there is none. Media as the enemy of the people and a force for ill not good. Bias yes but perhaps worse.

And here's a transcription of that very Today interview where, as Gammon says, Mr Miles makes it clear that the demand for storage is coming from panicking European food producers but Nick Robinson doesn't pick up on that and sticks with plugging away at the "the food industry [generally] is stockpiling in the run-up to Brexit" angle instead: 

Nick Robinson: Brexiteers say there's no need to worry about food supplies if there is no deal, but the food industry is stockpiling in the run-up to Brexit. One firm in Wales, Wild Water, has told the BBC it's renting and buying extra space. And I've been speaking to Jon Miles, UK director of NewCold, whose cold storage warehouse in Yorkshire is one of the biggest in the country. I asked him if they were running out of space.
Jon Miles: Yes, we've got one huge Wakefield warehouse that we extended by 150% last year, and in the first half of next year we've already sold all of that space, or committed all of that space. 
Nick Robinson: And you do link that directly to worries about Brexit?
Jon Miles: Yeah, I think there were constraints in the market anyway, there was capacity issues anyway, but certainly the Brexit issue...We've had people contacting us - European food producers - asking us for space in the first six months of next year which we now just can't provide.
Nick Robinson: So who are the sorts of companies that would use your facility?
Jon Miles: Any frozen food producer realistically. So we work with some big UK brands - so McCain and Aunt Bessie are two of our customers for example - but any frozen food producer really. We store specifically for frozen food companies. 
Nick Robinson: And the argument for them needing the space now is a worry that the borders simply might not allow, border controls might simply not work, in the way they have been.
Jon Miles: We've got our anchor customers - they're UK-based predominantly, so there's less impact on them - but the other people that...the other companies that have contacted me have all been European-based food producers who import to the UK and they're now really concerned about the borders, yeah.
Nick Robinson: Some might say, look, this is a sensible precaution and when we know whether there's a deal and also what sort of Brexit deal there is, yeah, people will be able to cancel the orders they put your way.
Jon Miles: Yeah, yeah, they could. I think we're trying, obviously, we're trying to get people to confirm that they'll take that space. So if we do deals - we don't have room now - but if people are dealing deals for Brexit I imagine they will be charging for that space anyway. And I think depending...it's obviously dependent on what deal looks like...I think there's also concern about how long this might go on. I'm certainly not an expert - there'll be people from the DFT that can talk about this much more eloquently than I - but some of the horror stories you hear about queues backing up back up to the M25 and the M20 and beyond, I think there is a real concern.
Nick Robinson: A real concern that's now leading to potential stockpiling of food.
Jon Miles: Correct. Yeah.
Nick Robinson: Jon Miles UK director of NewCold, thank you.

4 comments:

  1. Of all the BBC's loathsomely biased menagerie, the Robinson Reptile is certainly one of the worst, though the Simpson Snake (slithering through the BBC undergrowth, never doing much apart from hissing), the Bryant Bull Toad (virtue signalling at its loudest), and the Zurcher Zebra (it's all black and white to him) are also pretty repellent.

    The BBC itself is a stockpile of useless bias, gone mouldy over the years due to lack of connection to the national grid of reality.

    If we really need more cold storage I am sure we can hire a few ships at short notice to dock at our ports and do the job. But I still maintain come deal or no deal there ain't gonna be a food crisis.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm laughing at the cast of grotesques!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Robinson desperately trying to keep the interviewee "on message"...

    ReplyDelete

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.