Brexit: Agriculture and Farm Animal Welfare (European Union Committee Report)

Baroness Murphy Excerpts

Tuesday 17th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Murphy (CB)]

My Lords, I speak with no more expertise in agriculture than being resident in rural south Norfolk, so I am rather like my noble and learned friend Lord Hope in that respect; I am surrounded by fields. The county of Norfolk has the largest agricultural sector of any English county and contributes 7% of English food production. I am a psychiatrist first and a historian second. I do not think that my first skill will be useful in this debate but perhaps the second will be.

I congratulate the committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, on identifying in no uncertain terms the serious risks to which the Government are exposing our rural community. Leaving the European Union is of course a political decision, not an economic one, but in my view possibly the most foolish political decision a UK Government have taken in my lifetime. I do not blame the British public. If you ask them a foolish question, you will get a foolish answer. There is no escaping it, however, because apart from the Lib Dems, the main political parties are intent on hurtling over the cliff like lemmings. By the way, lemmings are not committing suicide; they are simply misjudging the distance they have to jump across the water to find a new habitat—a rather better analogy for the Brexiteers, I think.

Our rural economy is kept afloat by the £3 billion that flows into rural areas from the EU, and while there is a commitment to the continuity of mainstream CAP funding over a brief transition period, history tells us that the Government will almost certainly pull the plug on farming subsidies quite quickly. There seems to have been very little in the way of learning from history of how previous subsidies developed over a longer historical period. I will not go back to the support for wheat producers through the Corn Laws that went on for 30 years after the Napoleonic wars, as the noble Lord, Lord Jopling, did, but I will refer to 1917 as the Atlantic blockades began to bite during the First World War. The Corn Production Act 1917 and Agriculture Act 1920 ensured that the last years of the Great War were profitable ones for farmers, but those Acts which protected farm wages and corn prices were repealed in 1921—just three years of peacetime for the Government to lose interest in farming. In 1921 the Government were facing a potential £20 million subsidy bill for the agricultural sector when other parts of the economy had no such protection and high food prices were resented by a predominantly urban electorate. We are, and remain, a nation of townies. The result was a rapid reduction in agricultural wages, by about 40% in the first year, and the increased indebtedness of farmers, which did not improve until subsidies were re-introduced in the Second World War. Then it started all over again. Indeed, subsidies were withdrawn again after the Second World War, apart from support for some important food products we were short of.

What will be different this time round? Perhaps the Minister will tell me. Will the urban public be happy to see £3 billion go into a sector that produces only £9 billion of GDP? That seems unlikely. As the economic disaster of Brexit impacts on the rest of industry and our public services, the Treasury will surely look to that £3 billion pot to start funding its other priorities—and I might vote for it too. That is a threat to the very fabric of rural Britain, not only to our home-grown food production capacity but to the environment, landscape and wildlife. I thought the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, would say what she has said before: that it would be ironic if the old Britain that the Brexiteers are so nostalgic for is wiped out by Brexit itself.

Of course, if we get a common market free trade deal with Europe and a continuing customs union, all will not be so doom and gloom, and there could be a new settlement for agriculture and the environment. No one doubts that the common agricultural policy system is inefficient and has rewarded the wrong things. Indeed, I carry no candle for the great wheat barons of Cambridgeshire; I hope one is not sitting in the Chamber. It would be nice to see more-focused support for the type of sustainable but efficient food farming that produces goods that are attractive to consumers all over the world without ruining our landscape. However, if we leave with no deal, as some deluded folk seem to think we can with equanimity, then, as we have heard so often here, our farming communities will become theme parks, perhaps for foreign investors chasing nice houses. Will the Minister assure us—I am asking a lot—that the Government will not leave the EU without a realistic trade and customs deal sealed, and will create a mechanism to support the public benefit that farming can have for us all?