We welcome a fresh start for our farmers
The Tories are good at talking about the challenges of Brexit, but have too little to say about its opportunities. Michael Gove, thankfully, has a different approach. His department, Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, represents some of the workers whose lives could be most dramatically affected by leaving the EU. The Leave campaign promised that we would regain control, and yesterday Mr Gove detailed some of the practical ways in which taking back money and sovereignty from the EU could indeed improve the economy and ecology of these islands.
Until now, policy has been dictated by Brussels and enforced by subsidy. In essence, farmers are helped according to how much land they have, regardless of how they use it. For example, it was recently discovered that taxpayers were paying more than £400,000 a year to support a farm where a Saudi billionaire breeds racing horses. Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy is bureaucratic, discourages productivity growth, harms the environment and hurts farmers in poorer countries by undercutting foreign competition. Kofi Annan, former chief of the United Nations, once joked that the EU “pays enough subsidies to fly each cow in Europe around the world first-class and still have money left over”.
Leaving the EU gives Britain the chance to decide what type of agricultural policy it wants to have. Sometimes a false choice is offered: cheap mass production versus stewardship of the environment. As Minette Batters writes opposite, farmers feed the nation, yes, but they also help to maintain some 70 per cent of the land, and thus Mr Gove’s proposal that future subsidies should be used to reward sustainable as well as productive methods is sensible. Smaller farms and tenant farmers deserve special consideration; innovation in farming methods should be encouraged.
The fact that Mr Gove places such an emphasis upon looking after the environment – microbeads will be banned to prevent plastic entering the oceans and harming wildlife – confirms that Britain will remain a civilised country after Brexit. The notion that it is only the EU that has stopped us from drowning in pollution is nonsense. On the contrary, it is the statist, continental approach – which favours the rich, while keeping the poor hooked on subsidies – that has done the most harm. Free of Brussels, Britain can still boast a green and pleasant land.