Just before the election was called, news broke of Sue Gray’s so-called “shit list”: an inventory compiled by the Labour leader’s chief of staff of the immediate challenges an incoming Labour government would face. They include the potential collapse of Thames Water, prison overcrowding and chronic-acute issues with the NHS. One challenge was notable for its absence: the very real risk of empty supermarket shelves. The fact is British agriculture is in crisis. Its absence from the list is not entirely surprising. Historically, Labour has been an urban party. At the 2019 election it won just three of the 100 most rural seats. It has never quite grasped the importance or complexities of agriculture and the food supply chain.
That said, the Tories won 96 of those 100 seats, have many farmer MPs and have still made a bloody mess of it. The first challenge they will bequeath to Labour, should it win, involves untying the tangled knot around imports and exports. The confused introduction of hyper-bureaucratic and horrendously expensive border checks is the result of hardcore Brexit ideology. Boris Johnson could have negotiated alignment with the EU on food standards and animal welfare. Then we would simply be doing internal checks as before, and trade would flow freely.
But that would have stopped us doing terrible deals with other countries of the sort the EU would not allow. It’s why many UK products are now marked “Not for EU”. It isn’t that they don’t currently comply with EU standards; it’s that theoretically they may not. If an incoming Labour government negotiated alignment on food standards, huge costs and bureaucracy would be stripped out of food production. Imports could flow. With our self-sufficiency at just 60% and falling, that would be a very good thing. We need them.
Because there’s an even bigger issue around resilience in UK agriculture. Farming is not like other sectors. It’s both extremely risky and absolutely vital. It should be classed as a public good. Underpinning the 1957 treaty of Rome, the foundation of the whole European project, was an understanding that Europe had been ravaged by war for the previous century and that making sure everyone was properly fed would contribute massively to peace and stability. That led in turn to the common agricultural policy (CAP) and subsidy by land ownership. It’s not contradictory to believe in the EU but recognise the CAP was in dire need of reform. Subsidy by acreage ended up paying some landowners not to farm.
The Conservatives have been withdrawing that subsidy and replacing it with a system that essentially rewards only environmental good. Of course, looking after the environment is vital, but the new system means you can make more money from, say, sowing wild flowers rather than growing crops. Labour has made encouraging noises about the need to support food production, but it generally comes down to a commitment to public bodies buying British ingredients. It’s a nice gesture, but not vastly more. British agriculture needs to have the risk of the job done on our behalf properly underwritten, either by a government-backed insurance scheme or some form of more focused subsidy.
After months of terrible weather and industry challenges, farmers are talking about quitting. The unmitigated market will not keep us fed, however much the neo-liberal headbangers want to pretend otherwise. In 2017, as the challenges posed to agriculture by Brexit were becoming clear, I interviewed Ian Wright, the then director general of the Food and Drink Federation. “If you can’t feed a country,” he said solemnly, “you haven’t got a country.” Labour could do far worse than put that slogan right at the very top of Gray’s shit list.