The new UK regulatory framework on genetically modified (GM) plants threatens both the right of farmers to choose what crops they grow and the right of consumers to know what they are eating. Patrick Holden – CEO of the Sustainable Food Trust and part of the successful 1990s campaign for the appropriate regulation of GMOs – highlights why we must act now if we want to preserve our right to keep GM plants out of our fields and GM food off our plates.

I have photographs of myself from the late 1990s, standing outside the High Court in London holding a placard. I was director of the Soil Association then, and we were in the middle of a major public campaign against the introduction of genetically modified crops into British farming. The cameras were there. The public and other civil society groups were with us. The momentum was with us.

We won – or so it seemed. Not by making GM crops illegal, but by ensuring they were regulated. A tough regulatory framework, backed by strong labelling requirements and even stronger public opinion, meant that GM crops never took root in British fields. For nearly two decades, that felt like enough.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t because regulation, as we have all learned to our cost, can be rewritten, debated by MPs who don’t understand what they are debating, or worse are told what position to take by the party, and signed into law in by ministers who haven’t read them. That was our Achilles heel, and we didn’t see it coming.

The industry we thought we had seen off came back, and it came back with a plan.

Three things converged to make this possible. The first was a genuine development in the science: a new technique called gene editing, which gives scientists the option of modifying a plant’s own genetic material rather than splicing in genes from an unrelated species. The second was Brexit – or more precisely, what Michael Gove called the “unfrozen moment,” the opportunity to strip away what his party regarded as overcautious European regulation. The third was a compelling political narrative: that Britain, freed from Brussels, could become a world leader in agricultural innovation, with Norfolk- and Cambridge-based plant scientists at the vanguard.

Put those three things together and you have a powerful lobby, a receptive government, and a story the media were willing to tell sympathetically.

Same old arguments, better PR

I was one of several NGO representatives who attended consultation meetings organised by Defra over the last few years, and we made the arguments against the proposed legislation with some force – the substantive grounds were strong. But the atmosphere was entirely different from the first time round. Instead of opposition making headline news, the media were largely seduced by the vision of Britain leading in agricultural innovation. What a contrast with the 1990s, when our campaign led the evening bulletins.

The argument the industry is making today is, at its core, the same one it had made then – that these genetically engineered plants are essentially no different from any other plant you’d find in a field or a hedgerow. Tony Blair’s government had accepted a version of this argument in private, but the late Michael Meacher, his Environment Secretary, fought it publicly and the campaign held.

Today there is no one remotely like Meacher. The legislation moved through Parliament, and when Labour came to power in 2024, rather than pause or reconsider, they accelerated it. The Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act became law in 2023, and despite some well-articulated opposition from NGOs and the House of Lords secondary regulations, which allow precision bred plants to be grown and sold as food, followed in 2025.

Taking our rights away

We cannot now unpick the primary legislation without another Act of Parliament. That argument is, for the moment, closed. What remains open – and what matters enormously – is what sits underneath it: the new regulatory framework that undermines three fundamental rights.

The first is the right of farmers to grow crops that have not been gene edited, without fear of contamination from those that have. The second is the right of consumers to know what they are eating and to choose accordingly. The third is the right of the wider natural world – the wild plants, the insects, the birds, the entire web of life that still manages to coexist with our farming systems – to be protected from changes whose long-term consequences we cannot yet know.

In my view, the regulations fail on each count. That is why a judicial review has been brought, and why I am a co-claimant in it.

It is worth being clear about who has actually been watching while others looked away. Beyond GM, the civil society organisation leading this legal challenge, and the wider UK network of UK GM groups have never stopped monitoring this issue – tracking the legislation, analysing the regulations and building the evidence base with a forensic attention to detail that puts many larger and better funded organisations to shame. While the rest of the movement drifted toward other priorities, they stayed in the room. This judicial review exists because of this.

Where is everyone?

But here is what I find genuinely shocking, and what I think demands an honest reckoning. Where are the other voices?

The National Farmers’ Union represents tens of thousands of farmers, including many who depend on the organic premium and the credibility that comes with a guarantee of non-GM status. Silence. The Consumers Association exists precisely to defend the public’s right to know what is in their food. Silence. The major environmental NGOs, with their memberships, their legal teams, their media relationships and their decades of expertise in exactly this kind of regulatory battle. Silence. And the organic movement itself – the community with the most immediate and practical stake in getting this right – seems to be fighting from the shadows and sidelines.

Time to speak up

I have thought carefully about how to characterise this absence, and I want to be direct. I don’t think it is cowardice. I think it is something more troubling: a failure to understand what is actually happening – not just where we are but where we are rapidly going. The legislation is complex.

The shift from primary law to secondary regulation is technical. The distinction between what we have lost and what remains to be fought for is genuinely difficult to communicate in the bullet point world of social media. These missing voices have been like the proverbial frog in slowly heating water – and I say this not to wound but to wake them up, because the water is now very close to boiling.

The judicial review being heard in May is not a rearguard action by a handful of obsessives. It is, I believe, one of the most important legal challenges to agricultural policy in a generation – a serious argument, mounted by serious people and serious lawyers, with serious evidence. I became a co-claimant because I believe that. I am an organic farmer. This is not an abstract issue for me.

What I am asking of the Sustainable Food Trust’s community, and of every organisation that believes food systems should work with nature rather than against it, is straightforward. Understand what is at stake. Say so publicly. And join us, spread the word, write to your MP,  make a donation to the legal fighting fund – because a coalition of the willing, speaking clearly and together before and after the hearing, may yet change the terms of this debate.

You can make a donation to the Stop Hidden GMOs fighting fund at CrowdJustice. Read more about the court case at Beyond GM and Stop Hidden GMOs

Featured image by Markus Spiske (Unsplash).