Western Morning News (Saturday)
Uplands has us back on anti-farmer soapbox
Bridgwater and Somerset MP sometimes wearies of cut-and-paste correspondence, he says in an open letter to Defra Secretary and Camborne & Redruth MP George Eustice
DEAR George, When you’ve been in this job as long as I have you tend to get a nose for certain type of correspondence. And I have long since learned to sniff out the difference between an individually crafted written approach and one that has merely been downloaded from the website of some campaign group, signed by an individual and pinged into my mailbox.
Such communications tend to follow a certain formula. They are usually couched in general terms and are thus woefully short on local detail. They contain sweeping assertions and they have clearly been crafted by professional advisers so as to contain the appropriate number of bullet points and key messages – both easily identifiable.
And they have an odd, soulless feel to them. Most individually written letters will reveal at least something about the character of the author. These never do.
I do not attach any less weight to them than I do to letters from individuals who have taken the trouble to sit down and compose their own correspondence. Both sorts are treated equally.
That said you will forgive me, I hope, for saying that I get a little irritated at being bombarded by letters which urge me, for instance, to work to achieve what is referred to as “a better deal” for uplands’ residents, workers, landowners, visitors and taxpayers and to be informed: “Our hills should provide benefits for all.” Which is really like telling me I should look both ways before crossing the road.
I cannot agree more that the uplands “should benefit our health and wellbeing, as beautiful places to relax and enjoy the scenery and
Ian Liddell-Grainger
wildlife”. But when I am then told in broad, sweeping terms “we need to reverse decades of dewilding and put the wildlife back into the uplands. We need to diversify landscapes, restore a mix of habitats and shift away from over-burning, overdraining and overgrazing”, then the alarm bells start ringing themselves off the wall because here we are back on the anti-farmer soapbox.
Let me go through the points as they apply to my constituency and many others with uplands.
1. We have not had decades of dewilding, merely of farmers reclaiming some of the uplands – entirely in line with prevailing national policies – to provide food for the nation.
2. Despite this process the uplands are teeming with wildlife – though of the indigenous kind rather than the exotica the rewilders would like to see reintroduced.
3. The uplands landscapes are already diverse and the habitats are mixed, which is what makes areas such as Exmoor so attractive to tourists.
4. “Overburning” is, as far as I am aware, only a recently raised issue and one which questions the centuries-old use of this particularly successful, traditional land management tool.
5. Over-draining is more a lowland issue.
6. Overgrazing hardly applies to the uplands where the vast majority of farming is extensive because the landscape and climate won’t support anything else.
There is plenty more in this document that I and (I trust) all MPs can go along with, such as the need to protect rare birds of prey.
But in all this Utopian vision for the future of the UK uplands nowhere is there a single mention of ‘farmers’ or ‘farming’ – words now so distasteful to the campaigners, obviously that they cannot bear to enunciate or write them.
Yet who will maintain the uplands under this new regime? They surely will require maintaining or else they will become invaded by scrub and be so unattractive no tourists will want to visit and you’ll get a repeat of the situation up in Cumbria where wardens have had to hack away the wilderness to allow them their legitimate access.
National parks can’t afford staff to maintain and manage thousands of acres and thus the only people who will be able to will be farmers who, I know, will be perfectly happy to implement the new regime as long as they are reasonably well remunerated – because, I might remind the campaigners, they have a right to earn a living the same as anyone else.
I am minded, in fact, to reply to the sender suggesting the letter someone else wrote, a computer generated one that they signed, might have carried a little more weight with me if it had acknowledged the superb professionalism of farmers in maintaining our uplands – within the constraints of a national policy framework – so far and accepting the fact that only farmers will be able to deliver the benefits and improvements they seek.
But I doubt it would get read. So I shan’t bother.
Judi Spiers on ‘how Lady Lucy’s petit fours made harbour master and volunteers run aground’