I strenuously doubt that there are any MPs in Westminster currently drawing pay and lavish expenses who have the remotest idea about farming in this country, including the idiot who was caught viewing porn in The House of Commons whilst, allegedly, looking for second-hand tractors.
The hill farmers I’ve met, and known over the years, don’t drive Range Rovers. They usually have an ancient Land Rover, or an old Toyota Land Cruiser, along with a second-hand Ford Focus or Vauxhall Astra used for visits to the nearest town. On paper they’re worth a few quid – hypothetically – given a notional valuation of several hundred acres of land. In reality, they’re lucky to see incomes of £30-40,000 a year, which is quite often supporting two families of the father and son, or daughter, of the tenanted farm.
There are many dairy farmers who are a few grades up from the hill farmers in terms of income, but they’re stuck with longer hours, commonly well over 100 hour working weeks, which pro rata, puts them up on the average total annual income scale with hill farmers, but not much up on the rate per hour which isn’t usually over £7.00 in a good year vs £11.44 - the minimum legal rate of pay in the UK.
Farming is a very tough business. If you don’t love rearing cattle, sheep and pigs, you’d be completely bonkers to even consider this as a career. The new and insidious, politically motivated, attack on farmers needs to be challenged by a broader constituency than the NFU. More people, voters, need to get behind this.
To legislate for the demise of these long-standing custodians of large parts of our countryside in favour of a transferred ownership to oligarchic/City funds, or State controlled land is an egregious abnegation of a centuries’ old functional and valuable national tradition.
Looking at my last sentence pretty well explains why this Labour government is attacking farmers, just in case we’d missed this….it’s a ‘valuable national tradition’, ergo, to be despised and eradicated as soon as possible as required in the Marxist/Labour urban ‘tradition’. The idea that the forfeiture of farmland, through the new Agricultural Inheritance Tax exception removal, might result in many more thousands of acres of solar panels and wind turbines merely confirms my prejudices on the matter.
Fertile agricultural land can’t thrive in perpetual shade, not least when large parts of this are concreted over for access. Hundreds of thousands of acres of productive farmland given over to solar panel arrays in this country is an insane exercise in expensive futility unless our Lords and Masters manage to alter the Earth’s current pattern of rotation around the Sun. Investing in solar arrays in the Sahara and sub-Sahel makes more sense, although there’s a huge loss through transmission via inter-connectors. Unlike our legislators, electricity isn’t a dense form of energy. Much like them, the energy dissipates significantly over any distance.
Solar doesn’t work in our latitudes beyond offsetting the bills for people who can afford to put the solar panels on their roof and be able to afford to wait 15 years to see their capital investment being paid off. It’s not unlike the unresolvable dilemma presented to 65% of householders who don’t have offroad parking with which they can charge their Electric Vehicles to get the ‘bargain basement’ low-cost home consumer rates, instead of the commercial rates which cost more per mile than petrol and diesel cars.
It’s a peculiar form of discrimination against poorer people than one would normally expect from a Labour government, until one realises that Labour dropped that constituency some 30 years ago and confirmed that they were dropped in 2016 when the ‘Red Wall’ largely voted to Leave the EU.
The result of the destruction of many hundreds of thousands of acres will be considerable and will not be easy to recover once a future government realises that the whole Net Zero CO2 premise of Anthropogenic Global Warming has been a monumental mistake. It’s already happening in the USA, in case anybody here has missed this….unlikely, I know.
My guess is that we shall soon see the logical conclusion that AGW and Net Zero have absolutely no basis in actual ‘proper’ science as so many of us have worked out already. It’s a con trick which has promoted the absurd, grandiose and egocentric concept that mankind can control the climate of the Earth. In olden times, they would burn people at the stake for espousing such mendacious and arrogant nonsense.
I’m rather hoping for less drastic measures being inflicted on the perpetrators of this mythology in the not-too-distant future, once the penny has dropped with a wider, less gullible, audience. I’m not a vindictive sort of bloke. I’d settle for seeing them all deprived of any public/state-funded pensions.
I’d like to repeat the scientific knowledge which we’ve acquired through the efforts of ‘proper’ scientists over the last 50 years or so: ‘Rises in atmospheric levels of CO2 have tended to follow rises in global temperatures, not the other way around.’….This is from scientists who have analysed the many deep core samples through earth and ice over many years. It’s not at all related to the dubious hypotheses exclusively premised on computer modelling by people with an unscientific ‘Green’ political agenda, some of whom have been exposed as charlatans but are still deemed worthy of support by our delusional Lords and Masters.
Consider this: The once mighty German automotive industry in the European ‘Economic Power House’ has been brought to its knees by the Green political movement in Germany which has colonised the entirety of the established political parties across Europe over the last 30 years.
Germany is now dependent on scraping up high-sulphur content lignite and knocking down villages and wind turbines to do so, just to keep the lights on. The irony of knocking down wind turbines in Germany is exquisite. It’s an absurd scenario which would have been regarded as a satirical comedy less than 10 years ago.
Mercedes and VW are closing major plants in Germany and shifting more parts of their declining production offshore. The biggest German chemical industrial firm, BASF, once known for cassettes in my day, has already decided to move large parts of its manufacturing capacity to the US because, in the words of its spokesman, ‘Gas prices are 50% of those in Germany and electricity is 20% of the cost.’….That’s ‘20% of the cost’, not a mere 20% lower cost….
I mention this as an extreme position which has been forced on another European country. The remnants of what’s left of UK car manufacturing is being penalised into oblivion by an arbitrary fine, per vehicle of £15,000, if they sell less than 25% Electric Vehicles. To describe this as an incentive is tantamount to justifying some of the excesses to incentivise production in the old USSR which included shipping failing managers off to the gulags in Siberia.
The incontrovertible fact in the UK is that most consumers don’t want to buy an EV. They’re not even wholly persuaded by hybrids, with good reason. A friend of mine was forced to trade her new Seat Hybrid back after it kept stopping. She lost 48% on the trade-in after less than two years and was simply glad to get rid. No wonder the second-hand market is awash with EVs and hybrids. All that the government is achieving is to raise the prices of second-hand ICE cars, which is bonkers and makes life more difficult for people on lower incomes. How does this work under a Labour government? People on lower incomes are much less likely to have off-road parking and the chance to charge EVs at lower domestic power rates.
Back to the subject: I’ve enjoyed observing British farming and agricultural development for most of my life. I’ve had the opportunity to look at other countries and different systems of agriculture which suit in their particular way.
I would suggest that British farming has produced some of the most efficient and sustainable methods in both livestock and arable farming over some 200 years. A look at the history of the improved Hereford beef breed in the US offers a clue which goes back to the 19th century. By the same token, the Charolais and Limousin adoptions and improvements in the UK tell a similar story. Our farmers have been innovating and improving for many years. They’re very good at this. They deserve our respect.
We’ll lose all of this if ‘mega-farms’ become the new norm as traditional small to medium sized family holdings, owned or tenanted, are effectively bankrupted if ‘Rachel from Accounts’ socialist imposition of inheritance tax isn’t reversed.
The wealth of knowledge and experience, science and innovation, at the heart of our farming industry will be diminished and marked for extinction. Our many, and varied breed societies, whether in cattle, sheep or pigs will become even less viable than they are today, and we’ll lose that remarkable excellence of curated and managed diversity of livestock breeds which has taken some two centuries to develop and maintain.
This will impact quite soon, and it will damage this successful and resilient industry beyond measure. There’s absolutely no valid positive financial return to HMG’s HMRC from this spiteful new rule that could justify the damage which will result.
Lots of lawyers and accountants will make some money from this. The farmers will be the most obvious losers, although I suspect that we’ll all lose from the planned extinction of small to medium-sized family farmers.
Sadly, I don’t think that very many voters will actually notice this, much less give a damn about it. We’ve pretty much lost any, and all, of our roots in the rural parts of our country. The countryside is just a big place to go and enjoy with our cars, bikes, motorbikes, campervans, caravans, and the odd day trip. It’s our ‘right’ to enjoy this whenever we feel like doing so, and our ‘right to roam’ over any field trumps farmers’ rights to keep bulls or cows with calves within fences which we’ll happily climb over and then complain vociferously if it goes wrong.
Over about 100 years or so we’ve almost completely lost touch with farmers and the land, our distant origins and proximity to rural life. This was, for obvious reasons, perfectly understandable and inevitable. There did, however, remain a sense of fond reminiscence and respect for our bucolic origins which many of us still cherish because so much of it is utterly gorgeous.
Within my memory, certainly, workers in factories in cities and coal miners would make an effort to get some time in the nearest bits of the countryside, when possible, when they had some time to spare. It used to be almost a human imperative once the industrial revolution had got underway, and people hadn’t become so detached from their not too removed rural origins.
Sir Turnalot Starmer, Rachel from Accounts and Ed Miliband won’t be happy until this countryside of ours is entirely sequestered and put under large corporations, and/or some State Agency, with a large part of it obliterated by solar panels and wind turbine arrays as far as the eye can see.
They loath farmers and they loath those of us who love our countryside. The countryside is largely immune from regulatory diktat. It blooms and flourishes regardless of political regulation. It isn’t there simply for our pleasure although it offers so much pleasure freely.
We may see the obliteration of large parts of this because our idiotic politicians have determined that this be done. Our descendants will, one day, lament this crass despoliation and they will attempt to redress this. They won’t think kindly of us, and they’ll be right to do so.
If my observations appear to be less than convincing, let me try to encapsulate my thesis:
There’s an independent, traditional, and rugged determination which describes British farmers, and this is utterly detestable to the socialist, and conformist ethos which characterises the Labour Party and this government. No dissension is tolerated, unless it’s coming from the next winning leader who used to sit next to the previous incumbent and called him ‘my friend’.
If the Conservative Party’s leadership rituals resemble a ghastly weekend house party with the ‘Cluedo’ theme – lots of suspects and weapons – the Labour Party is much more similar to the ‘Good Old Politburo Game’ of the USSR from the last days of Stalin.
In remarkably appropriate style, they really want to break those 107,000 individual farmers, (Kulaks), who run 209,000 holdings over some 17.0 million hectares and see their properties in the hands of fewer, bigger owners and their contract managers because it’ll be easier to legislate for fewer numbers of owners and force them into compliance with the forthcoming State edicts.
I’m loath to go further with the analogy, but if we see local councils, or Government agencies, intervening in sales of farms resulting from bankruptcy in the second term of Sir Turnalot’s administration by 2031, remember where you first read about this….I don’t have a dream…I do have a nightmare.