As Parliament reopens today one of their senior MPs in Scotland has over the last few hours been stating very clearly on twitter that “I would have no hesitation in voting against any legislation which would allow chlorinated chicken or hormone-injected beef into this country. That’s a categorical assurance.” and of course if he was presented with a vote on the chlorinated chicken arrangement then unless he is an outright liar he would vote to oppose it and well done Douglas as there are a number of your colleagues that would not vote against it. They include Liam Fox and Jacob Rees-Mogg. However the dishonest or ignorant element of this claim is that on Monday 20th July, just as Parliament was preparing for its last few days at Westminster, he was one of the many Tories who voted for the opposite as I wrote here. Their votes had nothing directly to do with chlorinated chicken, hormone-injected beef or even the deals to allow other nations to control our NHS. However Douglas Ross and all of the Sussex Conservative MPs apart from Peter Bottomley voted in opposition to a small number of their colleagues. These people had proposed ensuring that each Trade Deal would be set out within Parliament before the negotiators would begin discussions with the other nations negotiators. Inevitably as the discussions took place things would need to come back to Parliament to see if priorities could be changed and no doubt some of the hard lines might need to be adjusted. However to remove all the opportunities for MPs to vote for matters such as chlorinated chicken is precisely what Douglas Ross agreed to. In doing so he was rejecting a proposal called clause 4 that Jonathan Djanogly who is the Conservative MP for Huntingdon had written out. It was supported by literally every other political party in Parliament and indeed by 11 Tories including  Damian Collins, Roger Gale and Theresa Villiers. In addition votes came from John Stevenson who like Djanogly is a Solicitor and also Peter Aldous, George Freeman and Julian Sturdy who are all people who have strong connections to the farming industry which is the industry that Douglas Ross is claiming to be responding to in this tweet.

If Douglas Ross wanted the opportunity to oppose chlorinated chicken themes in future trade deals he would have supported Jonathan Djanogly and he did not!