This is apparently all down to fears of food shortages from a combination of rising input costs, farmers quitting the industry because of cheap competition from overseas, labour shortages, subsidies being phased out and new agricultural policies which focus on nature rather than food production.
The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy was always thought to be unpopular with farmers but the old Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) had the benefit of being relatively easy to administer and at minimum didn’t force farmers to give up farming.
The UK government are starting to find out just how difficult it is to come up with a policy which saves money (always at the top of any Conservative list), encourages food production and doesn't damage the environment.
England has come up with a series of schemes including the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) and the Environmental Land Management (ELM) schemes. The EU is also reforming the CAP but the key difference is that the incentives for environmental improvements are (a) voluntary and (b) in addition to the BPS. In England, the new systems replace the BPS entirely.
In Wales, farmers are protesting about the system being proposed by the devolved administration that encourages hill farmers to plant trees on 10% of their land and designate another 10% as wildlife habitat as part of the Sustainable Farming Scheme (SFS). Nobody is happy.
Brexit has been disastrous for farming. It has destabilised the whole industry and because of its impact on the wider economy, simultaneously reduced government revenues, forcing ministers to look for cost-cutting measures when what was needed was more money rather than less. I am not a farmer but it seems to me impossible to increase domestic food production by reducing farming incomes, undercutting the industry by signing unbalanced trade deals with lower standards and introducing policies like "Not for EU" labelling on our own food products.
The cost-of-living crisis hasn't helped either.
The latest issue is a row between trade secretary Kemi Badenoch and Steve Barclay over plans to introduce labels promoting homegrown food products, including the high animal welfare standards used to produce them. Badenoch is worried it will drive up food costs and risk upsetting Britain’s trade partners. She wrote to Barclay: “I am very concerned about the costs of such an approach on domestic producers and exporters to the UK,” in a letter seen by the FT.
It's barmy, they can't even agree among themselves on what they're trying to achieve.
Allister Heath
Allister Heath the editor of The Sunday Telegraph has got himself a reputation for writing articles on Britain which swing unpredictably between jingoistic flag-waving nationalism and a black hole of utter despair. He is either jeering at foreigners or having a nervous breakdown. There’s never anything in between, nothing that smacks of balance either in his own mind or from a journalistic standpoint.
I wonder what his family and friends think? Or his employees? I assume when they see him they don't know if he's about to slash his wrists or go out on the town to celebrate. I worry for his mental health, although not a lot.
This week’s effort is one of the bleakest yet: I have glimpsed the terrifying future of lazy, defenceless, near-bankrupt Britain.
He says: "We are an increasingly impoverished and indebted nation, a rudderless second-order global power, and yet, like penniless aristocrats harking back to a bygone age, we retain Rolls-Royce tastes and a misplaced sense of entitlement."
In 2022 he described Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous budget as the "best Budget I have ever heard a British Chancellor deliver, by a massive margin."
His article is a catalogue of Britain’s ills from the economy (underperforming) through our armed forces (shrivelled), the tax take (highest since the war), Birmingham (bankrupt), roads (potholed and litter strewn), the police (virtue signallers), prisons (full), house prices (sky high) and so on.
He doesn’t mention crumbling schools or an NHS on its knees and there is no mention of Brexit at all or the 5% (£125 billion) hit to the UK economy suggested by Goldman Sachs which it caused and which the article seems to show is precisely what has happened.
His solution by the way is either to copy Javier Milei, Argentina's new president, (the world’s most inspirational politician, according to Heath) and "usher in an economic revolution to turbocharge growth".
"This would require drastic tax cuts and simplification, privatisation, intense deregulation, the drastic downsizing of the green belt to allow mass house building, extreme divergence from the failed EU model, a resurrection of the stock exchange, an entrepreneurial revolution, radical foreign investment incentives and much else besides."
His second option is, again like Milei – "to simply take a chainsaw to the public sector, and accept that the state pension must be means-tested, the NHS needs to be part-privatised, and transfers and subsidies slashed."
Taking a chainsaw to public services after 14 years of austerity is like threatening to cut the rations of a starving man, but that is what he proposes.
Let's not forget in 2016 his answer was to leave the EU's single market. That hasn't worked out well has it?
