Pork pies and stilton under Brexit threat, says Nick Clegg

Lib Dem spokesman warns EU businesses could make imitations of regionally designated foodstuffs such as Melton Mowbray pork pies and stilton

Melton Mowbray pork pies, stilton cheese and British-made chocolate such as Cadbury's could be under threat from Brexit, the former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg has warned.

Speaking to a food and drink industry conference on the impact of leaving the European Union, Clegg said it was possible that European rivals would start producing lookalikes to British foodstuffs if they lost the legal protection from imitation offered by EU rules.

"Outside the EU they won't enjoy the appellation bestowed on those products and I would have thought other countries would take advantage of that pretty quickly and put products into the European market that directly rival those protected brands," Clegg said.

Melton Mowbray pork pies have protected geographical indication status, which acts just like a trademark or appellation d'origine contrôlée and stops manufacturers from outside a region copying a regional product. Stilton is covered by a protected designation of origin, which is linked to the region a product comes from. Gloucestershire Old Spot pork is protected under a third system - traditional speciality guaranteed - which the Birmingham balti is currently applying for.

There are 73 such protected food names in the UK, including wines, beers, ciders and spirits, as well as wool. The list of protected foodstuffs includes Cornish pasties, Whitstable oysters, Scotch beef, Jersey royal potatoes and Anglesey sea salt.

Clegg also warned that British chocolatiers could soon face difficulties in exporting to Europe for a different reason. Cadbury's-style chocolate, which has a higher vegetable fat and milk content than most continental rivals, only won the right to be sold as chocolate across Europe in 2003 after a 30-year battle. Before that, a number of EU countries, including Spain and Italy, banned chocolate that contained vegetable fat instead of pure cocoa butter.

Clegg said: "I would have thought that, relatively quickly, European chocolate manufacturers will say 'let's just tweak the chocolate definition' … then suddenly [British-style chocolate] cannot be called chocolate any more."

The former deputy prime minister, who is now the Liberal Democrat spokesman on Brexit, recently produced a report warning that foods including chocolate, cheese and wine would soar in price if the UK pursued a hard Brexit outside the single market.

He said that the promise from "Brexit enthusiasts" that a "low-cost bonanza beckons" as the UK strips away trade tariffs was unrealistic.

"This ludicrous utopia is simply not going to happen," Clegg said. "It is a disservice to the debate for anyone to predict that."

Clegg said that food import tariffs were there to protect British as well as German and French farmers. He added that it would not be in the national interest to unilaterally remove them as this would remove the UK's bargaining power when it was trying to gain access with trade partners for exports such as legal services and accountancy.

He warned that the government needed to develop a trade strategy that would reassure businesses that would increasingly be demanding the same treatment promised to Nissan. The car manufacturer recently committed to further car production in the UK after receiving a promissory letter from the government.

He warned the government against "making commitments without the power to deliver them".

"If this carries on, we will just get a series of untransparent, potentially expensive, lopsided jumble sale deals between the government and one sector after another. You can't run such a complex economy as ours in such a piecemeal fashion," Clegg said.