Blame Holyrood for bureaucracy

On BBC Newsnight recently Lord Mandelsen defended the EU and blamed some member states for gold plating EU rules and regulations. “Above all it is the member states whose job is to contain the impact of that regulation without any deleterious side effects,” he said.

With that in mind I paid a flying visit to the Charente Valley region of France and saw farms in and round Ruffec

What I saw was impressive; oil seed rape fields in flower and evenly yellow.

One suspects any errant pigeon intent on eating a farmer’s crop is bagged for the pot before it even lands.

Winter wheat looked excellent and one month ahead of home.

Farmers were working the land to sow maize.

The whole area was wall-to-wall cropping and no sign of any land set aside to comply with EU rules on ‘greening’ where 5% of arable land must be devoted to ecological focus areas.

Instead of taking good quality arable land out of production, French farmers can instead use poorer quality land that can be found in large wooded areas in the region.

So in France there is no two-metre ban on growing crops next to hedges.

Farmers can rent poorer quality land to comply with greening requirements.

What is clear to me is that the French Government has taken full advantage of the flexibility built into the new CAP to ensure there are no extra bureaucratic burdens or restrictions on French farmers.

But we do not need to go as far as France, as farmers in England and Wales are also better supported than farmers in Scotland.

Richard Lochhead, our hapless SNP farm minister, had every chance to keep things simple and, like his French counterpart, use the flexibility of the EU rules on greening to ensure there would be no impact on our ability to farm competitively on a global market.

Although the Brian Pack report had warned Lochhead of the consequences of not keeping things simple and had predicted a possible meltdown in the IT system, Lochhead and his SNP Government decided to ignore Pack’s warnings and instead gold plated EU rules and imposed acres of extra red tape on hard-pressed Scottish farmers.

We have ended up with the worst possible situation.

An over-complicated set of new rules on greening that include a crazy ban on growing crops within two metres of a hedge; a ban on vining peas in Scotland that will end up moving more production to England, penalising those farmers who have over the years planted miles of hedgerows in favour of those farmers who ripped up all their hedges in the ’70s and ’80s.

And to cap it all, the SNP Government blew £178 million of taxpayers’ money buying a duff IT system.

So when you get mad at all the red tape and the time wasted trying to fill in endless forms online, do not blame the EU.

The blame solely rests with an utterly incompetent SNP Minister and Government.