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Before Britain joined the Common Market it had close to nineteen hundred abattoirs. It now has around two hundred and fifty, and they are closing at roughly one in ten every year.
This sounds like a dull bit of infrastructure. It is the quiet chokepoint that decides whether local meat can exist at all. A farmer with a small high-welfare herd needs somewhere nearby to have the animals killed and butchered if he wants to sell direct, to a butcher, a restaurant, a farm shop. When the local abattoir shuts, his nearest one is two hours away, the animals travel further and more stressed, the cost climbs, and at some point the whole thing stops making sense and he sells into the commodity system instead, or gives up.
A third of the smallest abattoirs closed in a single decade. And the processing that remains has consolidated to the point that three companies, ABP, Kepak and Dunbia, now control something like seventy per cent of British capacity.
Control the slaughterhouse and you control the meat. Britain has handed that control to a handful of firms and watched the local alternative quietly strangle.
You cannot have a local food system without a local abattoir. We are running out of both.
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