Thatcher and miners set to be revisited

LAST year the Welsh Government came to an agreement with the government in London to support London’s policy on Brexit in a number of devolved fields.

Recently we saw one of the results of this agreement – the Minister of Rural Affairs in the Welsh Government presented a two-option scheme to the Welsh agricultural industry. Neither of these are acceptable because they will result in the failure of a large number of family farms in rural Wales.

However, the minister is between “a rock and a hard place”, because she knows that the London government will not finance the continuation of the Single Farm Payment Scheme in England – and therefore also in Wales. The Welsh Government does not have the resources to pay it independently either.

The result has been that a scheme has been dressed up to put the blame on the farmers and their unions for their natural opposition to it.

The minister should take care that she is not in danger of promoting the sort of confrontation that occurred between Mrs Thatcher and the miners.

The minister must understand that the agricultural industry is part of a much larger rural economy, which includes the indigenous food industry and tourism.

These are also intimately intertwined with local employment, productive-population decline, school closures, the Welsh language and culture, the declining health service and the increased stresses on provision for the elderly.

A fight picked with the agricultural industry is by implication a fight picked with the whole of rural Wales. John H Davies Llandysul