Time to wake up and smell the coffee

What is the point of sitting at a table with folk who won’t even feed you scraps? How many times do they need to get shafted – 33m times and counting it would seem – before they realise that there is nothing on the table for farmers?

THE political leadership in Britain just now – or should I say lack of it – can only be described as an absolute shambles.

Ill thought-out announcements by our new PM and her inept Chancellor have brought a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘winging it’. And in Scotland it’s no better when the Cabinet Secretary responsible for agriculture is having a cosy cup of coffee with the board of directors and the president of NFUS whilst at the same time John Swinney is cutting the agriculture budget by £33m.

I’m so pleased I spent six months (for no reward), sorting out the historic issue of Convergence Funding and getting £26.5m a year of new money through the Bew Review until 2024/5. No sooner did we get the money, than it was directed to plugging a gap in LFASS funding and now it’s been taken out completely – this at a time of well-documented input inflation in agriculture way above the quoted RPI rate.

What has been the reaction of NFUS to this treachery? Not a murmur. Not even a press release.

No wonder Martin Kennedy refused requests from some of his branches to lobby for more funds to make up for inflation eroding our support payments. I bet he knew all along this £33m cut was the plan and did nothing.

Two weeks ago, Andrew Moir, a guy I have known, liked and respected for years, pleaded in his column in The SF not to chuck the NFUS president under a bus – the inference being that if it happened, we (‘the industry’), risk losing out with the government somehow. What absolute rubbish.

Martin decided to lie down on the road in front of the bus driven by John Swinney and, funnily enough, it has now run right over the top of him.

More people than me advised him, indeed, pleaded with him not to chair this appalling sham of a group called ARIOB, but he wouldn’t listen. He used the same daft argument that Andrew used two weeks ago, that he (and the group) had to be at the table with the Scottish Government and officials to make progress and get things done.

And where has that got him? Answer – absolutely nowhere. Totally shafted and neutered like a eunuch in the court of Cleopatra.

Andrew wrote a year ago in The SF that the time for consultation and talking needed to stop. We had the policy tools and strategy we needed, courtesy of the farmer-led group reports and it was time for action. Funnily enough, more than a year later, with ScotGov taking an absolute loan of NFUS and ARIOB, nothing has happened and he has called for action ... not words ... once again.

When will our so-called leaders wake up and smell the coffee? What is the point of sitting at a table with folk who won’t even feed you scraps? How many times do they need to get shafted – 33m times and counting it would seem – before they realise that there is nothing on the table for farmers?

There is a totally different agenda in play in Scotland and despite all the warm words, food production and farming as we know it don’t feature.

Look at the contrast in Eire. While Irish pig farmers get thrown a real lifeline of up to €85,000 per business to try and see them through these awful times for the pig sector, what do Scottish producers get? A visit from the First Minister and CabSec offering tea and sympathy ... then total silence.

For the beef sector, I nearly forgot, we now also have a QMS beef strategy – or should I say a SG-controlled beef strategy which isn’t allowed to talk about cattle numbers. And the headline? Let’s cut emissions from the beef herd by 75% by 2030 from 1990 levels.

What unbelievable bloody nonsense, unless of course you cut beef numbers by 30% by 2030 which, of course, is the real headline they still won’t come clean about. How many more examples of indifference to rural Scotland does NFUS need before they actually stand up for the industry?

Andrew quoted Harold Wilson in his piece. I’ll quote Winston Churchill by way of advice to Martin Kennedy – ‘You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth’.

And his head is sure in the mouth of ScotGov, and has been for over a year. It’s a disaster, not only personally for a decent guy like Martin, but for the whole industry at this perilous time.

So, at a time when we have no policy, no direction and no leadership for our industry, we get yet another another plea for farmers to contribute to a sterile debate about an Agriculture Bill. A document which offers absolutely nothing by way of information that could help struggling businesses plan for an uncertain future.

I recently read a summary of a study by the Rural Services Network based in England about how the cost of living crisis is hitting people (not just farmers) living in rural areas harder than those living in towns and cities.

The cost of heating mostly older properties (which, in the main, are not as well insulated) with limited connection to the gas grid, more expensive transport costs and consumables, including food (which all have additional transportation cost on them as well), all add to the higher cost of living in rural England.

Because of a greater reliance on cars, rural households in the study were spending £114/week on transport, compared to £80 for urban households. Wages of rural employees in the study were 12% less than their urban equivalents.

All this before you consider patchy broadband connectivity and poor infrastructure, including rural roads after years of neglect. Remember, this was an English study. For the more remote parts of rural Scotland, this problem will be much worse.

So, did the government in Scotland even consider these issues when they arbitrarily deprived rural Scotland of another £33m of badly needed liquidity?

Because this is not just about farm support. The farmers who receive public funds spend most of this money in their local areas with local businesses and local supply chains.

The multiplier effect of agricultural support is well known and accepted by anyone who knows anything about rural Scotland. So it is rural Scotland that will suffer from these cuts, not just farming.

All of this has been conveniently ignored when the politics of the asylum get to work and no one representing rural Scotland actually bothers to point this out, either constructively or forcefully.

So, I’m sorry, Andrew, but you’re wrong. Your ARIOB group, especially Martin, need to stop looking at the empty table you sit round and look in the mirror and ask yourselves ‘what on earth are we doing and why?’ Because you sure as hell aren’t representing anyone I talk to.