LONDON — On a high after Labour’s knock-out victory over the Tories at July’s general election, newly elected Environment Secretary Steve Reed made a bold promise he may now come to regret.

“We will stop farmers ever again being undercut by dodgy Tory trade deals that sell out Britain’s environmental and welfare standards, as they sell out Britain’s exporters and food producers,” he said to approving murmurs from fellow Labour MPs, just two weeks after Britain went to the polls.

Two months on, campaigners say the new government is already eating its words by attempting to block a legal challenge to the U.K.’s controversial free trade agreement with Australia, which was negotiated and signed under the Conservative.

In June the campaign group Feedback was granted permission for a full judicial review of the law that implemented the much-hyped post-Brexit trade agreement over environmental concerns.

The campaigners claim the agreement failed to take into account the impact of the deal on the U.K.’s international climate targets. 

Crucially, the High Court also granted them the right to a cap on legal fees they would be on the hook for under the Aarhus Convention, an international agreement signed by the U.K. which ensures access to justice in environmental matters.

But the British government has now been granted the right to appeal the cost-cap ruling, which campaigners say could price them out of their attempt to get justice and goes against the Labour government’s own promises on trade.

“It is deeply disappointing that the government is loudly claiming it will no longer enter into trade deals that undercut Britain’s environmental goals on the one hand, while seeking to block a judicial review of the climate implications of the U.K.-Australia free trade agreement on the other,” Feedback’s executive director Carina Millstone said in a statement.

“If the government genuinely wishes to break with the reckless trade and environmental policies of its predecessor, dropping its inexplicable attempt to block this judicial review would be a fine place to start.”

Carol Day, a solicitor from the firm Leigh Day, which is representing the campaign group, said protection from legal costs was “crucial” to Feedback, “otherwise it may be priced out of court and the case will not be heard, which our client says is an extremely worrying development.”

Farmers reacted furiously when then-Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson signed off on the Australia agreement, which will eventually lead to tariff-free access to for Australian food, amid fears of a flood of cheap meat imports in the U.K. 

According to Feedback, the agreement was based on a “flawed environmental assessment” which fails to take into account a recognized methodology to compare livestock emissions. 

The group also claims that the government’s impact assessment of the deal fails to quantify the carbon impact of any changes to domestic U.K. meat and dairy consumption because of tariff-free imports of Australian food.

As a signatory of the 2015 Paris Agreement, the U.K. government has committed to “pursue efforts” to limit global warming to 1.5C, and to keep them “well below” 2.0C above those recorded in pre-industrial times.

A U.K. government spokesperson said: “We do not comment on ongoing legal proceedings.”