Dom Morris is a 4th generation farmer taking in the Cotswolds. He is a county councillor and a former adviser to the Government on defence and security.
It was quite the Budget day for me. “IDK!!” I was frantically typing whilst trying to keep the tractor and seed drill straight.
It was that awful Wednesday lunchtime; we’d had biblical rain and drilling next year’s crop is beyond character building. We’d probably already worked the 37.5 hours of the EU’s beloved Working Time Directive and there was 67 hectares of winter wheat still to go. Politicians, colleagues, and mates were texting me to ask if our family farm, colleagues and our community were safe from Rachel Reeves.
I really didn’t know. I was frantically trying to remember my master’s in international political economy. I am pretty sure history is clear, nations without the means to produce energy, forge steel and grow food don’t last very long. In just a couple of months, ‘Red Ed’ has got after our energy, then the steel industry took a blow and then Labour’s budget came after the UK’s food sovereignty.
Make no mistake. British farming is in peril. We have found ourselves at a crossroads in our nation’s future. There is a battle being waged above our heads by this nation’s elite: to Produce or to Conserve (spoiler alert, the conservationists are winning!).
They take away our options to treat deadly fungus, they allow our supermarkets to push prices below the cost of production, they bribe farmers to grow pink flowers instead of food with DEFRA’s dead hand monitoring us to within 0.01 of a hectare – this is beyond 1984’s wildest dreams. And beyond this political folly, the weather gets a vote.
September was the wettest month on record since my family moved to the farm in 1959.
And just as you begin to wonder whether it’s paranoia, some Blairite apparatchik rocks up on TV and social media to say they can do without small farmers, and we should go the way of the miners in the 80s! How does that help with what type of food we put in our mouths and ensuring that food sovereignty keeps our shelves stacked? At some point very soon, the British public will have to choose: Do you want us to grow food or pink flowers? Do you want fresh, local, high-quality food or do you want food that’s been on a boat for weeks and weeks. And that’s if the boat can get here!
Russia, China, North Korea and Iran must be laughing their socks off as we do this to ourselves. For the great power competition between the West and the increasingly united Authoritarian Alliance continues apace. As Putin becomes China’s farm and petrol station, Kim Jong Un subs Putin his cannon fodder and Iran fixes Western media…the West is committing is own strategic self-destruction – dismantling our nations’ states ability to feed, home and defend ourselves.
Since getting into local politics, it has struck he how many elected officials seem intent on telling us farmers what to do. The irony is that most of us are too busy actually putting seeds in the ground to pull these urban pundits up and call them out.
In Shire Hall in Gloucestershire, opposition members of all colours pass endless motions on expanding the Council’s own farming estate (as if Councillors would know how to farm it?!), on what staff may (and may not!) eat in our canteens, on what legal activity tenant farmers on council land may and may not do. Not one of these opposition Councillors passing these motions are men or women of the ‘sod’. I’d like to see them shovel a tonne of wheat after an 18-hour day faster than my 73 year old father – come to think of it, it might be good for them.
And it is the same in Westminster. Until now, Parliament has been largely silent as we abandon food sovereignty, meanwhile our nation’s living rooms cheer on Jeremy Clarkson and Caleb with every episode of Clarkson’s Farm. What he has done for farming is extraordinary – and the public get it. And, spoiler alert – It’s popular. Now it is time for the Conservative Party to show that we get it.
The Conservative Party must return to its rural roots, reconnecting with farmers and the rural community – it must become our trade union. For opposing this ridiculous family farm tax is just the beginning.
We must be the countryside’s voice in Parliament; we must back the growing of food, not flowers; we must defend rural pursuits and the rural way of life; And we will be amazed by the warm reception we receive on the doorstep. For farmers and our rural communities are innately conservative.
What we need this week is an army of articulate Clarkson’s to tractor their way to Westminster with their democratic muck spreaders of accountability to give their verdict on Keir Starmer’s Family Farm Tax. Our nation’s ability to feed itself depends upon it.
Once farmers have made their frustrations clear on the streets, the Conservative party needs to come together and stand up for farmers. To come down unequivocally on the side of farmers and rural communities, to come down on the side of the producers and stand up against those who would want us to eat low quality, unregulated food off a boat!
Victoria Atkins has started to do just that. Not least today on this site
Last week we welcomed the newly appointed DEFRA Shadow Secretary of State to our family farm. Joining a Farmers study group she saw firsthand the challenges we face, both in our fields and on our (tax) forms!
Our Party must be their voice once again – standing up for our farmers and reconnecting with the rural community from which the Conservative Party came – for make no mistake, the Labour Party and their metropolitan backers are coming for us on all fronts.
