MILK QUOTAS are long gone, but their spectre continues to haunt the Italian government and farmers.

This is evidence that the European Commission is tough and generally fair when it comes to enforcing rules. We often feel it is only the UK that falls victim to harsh treatment by Brussels, but Italian attempts to bluff their way out of huge super-levy payments, going back to the 1990s, are not working.

They have already been taken to the European court and lost. They were allowed to 'lend' farmers money to pay the fines, but have not sought to have this returned. Now the European Commission, rightly, is saying enough is enough, and it wants the money paid.

The Italians have used every means they can think of to get around these fines. This is akin to the school-day excuse of the dog ate my homework book, but some of the excuses coming from Rome lack even that credibility. The latest ruse was a suggestion, allegedly backed by Italian financial watchdogs, that the data used to calculate milk quotas and production was so flawed that any calculation of super-levy must be equally wrong and invalid.

This is akin to arguing that you could not be guilty of burgling a particular house, because at the time it happened you were burgling an even bigger house down the road. Either way the Italian government is guilty of bending quota rules for years, and of then ignoring €1.35 billion due in super-levy payments from 1995/96 and 2008/2009. Of this figure, less than 7% has been paid by farmers. This is unfair to those who paid the levy in other member states – but as Italy is a net beneficiary of EU funds, Brussels has the ultimate sanction of taking the funds back.

This is the end game of a saga that goes back to the start of milk quotas. In Italy, from the outset, these managed to get tied up in corruption, with claims for herds that never existed other than on paper, and which grazed apartments in some of Rome's most fashionable districts.

As Italy was short of milk, it decided it need not need to implement milk quotas, and that continued for many years. When it was fined for over production it applied the same logic. When it was told this was wrong and it had to pay it sought and won a concession that it would pay the money and collect it from farmers. Problems however stemmed from the decision not to properly implement the quota regime in the first place. In reality, the Italian authorities have little knowledge about who owes the money, and even less clue about how to go about collecting it.

This has prompted the Italian payments agency to claim there was a problem with the algorithm used to calculate milk production. Algorithms decide everything from when airlines increase seat prices, based on demand, to adverts on Facebook linked to what we have liked or shared.

However claiming that a complex mathematical formula is the explanation for Italy's track record of ignoring milk quotas makes the 'dog ate my homework' excuse look believable.

This is all a far cry from the normal Brexit debate in this column, but it is summer and a bit of light relief is justified. However on the theme of Brexit, some things are becoming clearer – or perhaps more accurately less unclear. It seems that agriculture is on the list for big announcement from the government on its post-Brexit strategy. It is not clear at this stage how much detail there will be, or indeed whether the government will choose to debate its plans with the farming industry and others before publishing them.

It seems likely that this will emerge at or close to the Conservative party conference in early October, but it could emerge well before that, assuming it is an extension of the Michael Gove payment for delivering public good model.

It also now seems that we will ultimately be having a fairly hard Brexit – defined as one where we leave the customs union that would give us simple access to the EU single market. That will be a big challenge for the farming lobby, because while support is welcome, it is markets that are the real drivers of business.

On that basis, a busy and undoubtedly often frustrating autumn lies ahead for the farming lobby.