Britain doesn’t need farms? Find another box to think outside!

THE Mail on Sunday is emphatically not against original thinking in government. The permanent Civil Service is far from being the fount of all wisdom. Boris Johnson’s adviser Dominic Cummings has a case when he encourages the recruitment of outsiders and troublemakers to the government machine.

So, unlike many in the media, we do not automatically deride these dissidents. Even where their ideas are selfevidently impossible, they can stimulate new thinking where it is most needed. But let us not get carried away. There are still limits.

And Treasury adviser Tim Leunig’s airy dismissal of the importance of farming, which we reveal today, goes beyond those limits. Our United Kingdom cannot be compared with the concrete-coated island of Singapore, no bigger than the Isle of Wight. Nor can it be equated with London, another densely packed citystate which imports almost every morsel that it eats.

The UK is a proper country, rooted in its soil, and shaped by the distinct tastes of the food and drink it grows and makes. Most of us carry with us, however far away we travel, a picture in our minds of small fields, hedgerows, woodland and pasture, all of them distinctly and unmistakably British.

And this green demi-paradise is not the work of nature, but of farmers who have tilled and tamed and drained it over many centuries until it takes the form we now see. As for farmers, they are the embodiment of wise conservatism, the opposite of citified bohemians, governed by the seasons, aware at every minute of the virtues of hard work and of the value of experience.

One of the things we sought through Brexit was to regain the power to govern our agriculture as we wished and for our own national benefit, freed from the follies of the Common Agricultural Policy.

And it will do little good if we now instead succumb to American pressure to open our markets to the ruthless factory farming of US agriculture, with its questionable use of growth hormones and antibiotics, and its worryingly different hygiene methods. How long will our beloved countryside survive if it has to compete, unprotected, with the cheap products of that regime?

This is why it is worryingly wrong for Dr Leunig to suggest that farming is not ‘critically important’ to this country. He has mistaken cold figures for long-term truths, and ignored the emotional nature of patriotism. He should find another box to think outside.

Civil servants are not paid to decide

THE trouble with the great TV comedy Yes, Minister was that it was all absolutely true. Senior civil servants can and do frustrate the wills of politicians, whom they often regard as unqualified amateurs. They have many subtle and effective ways of doing so.

Reforming governments of both parties have tried to fight this in many ways since the 1960s, mainly by introducing increasing numbers of ‘special advisers’, who can counter the immense weight of Whitehall’s institutions.

But sometimes there are direct clashes, and the more radical the politician, the more likely these are. It is not for us to comment on the detailed relationship between the Home Secretary and her Permanent Secretary, Sir Philip Rutnam, who resigned so spectacularly yesterday.

But this general point should never be forgotten. Priti Patel is part of an elected Government with a large parliamentary majority and a solid popular mandate. She decides. Civil servants only advise. The undoubted influence of permanent officials can only be exercised if they recognise, at all times, this ultimate truth about power.