Farming

Wendy Chamberlain Excerpts

Monday 4th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Steven Bonnar (Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill) (SNP)]

Today’s debate had to be rescheduled, but we welcome what is still a timely debate on farming. The Scottish National party will always welcome any opportunity to speak on this issue and especially to give Scottish farmers a voice in this place.

I will talk today about the vital role farmers and farming play in the rich fabric of Scottish tradition and outline the impact of Scottish farmers on our nation’s economy, the health of our people, and the protection and management of our environment. I will also detail just some of the mounting pressures they face largely due to this Conservative Government’s long-held obsession with Brexit.

This debate is timely for several reasons. The first is that the Prime Minister spoke at the NFU annual conference a fortnight ago. “Brave” is a word that absolutely nobody would attribute to the current Prime Minister, but he is the first Tory Prime Minister to address the conference since 1992 and the first UK Prime Minister to do so since 2008. If anyone in this Chamber, or indeed any of our constituents, were looking for a telling insight into Westminster’s attitude to farming and agriculture, they need look no further than that.

I cannot help but wonder what it was that kept the Tory leadership away from such a meeting for so long. Why, despite having four Prime Ministers in that time, was the current Prime Minister the first in 28 years to make such a commitment—although in the interests of fairness it is only right that we acknowledge that the Prime Minister’s immediate predecessor was not in office long enough to have received an invitation? What might have been the cause of that historic hiatus? Perhaps it was a long-held tradition of successive Tory Governments taking the rural vote and communities for granted. Perhaps it was a fear of scrutiny from the sector itself, or perhaps it was the crippling knowledge that the Tory obsession with Brexit is playing the defining role in the decline of our once great agricultural industries. It was probably a combination of all three.

We on the SNP Benches believe that the Prime Minister’s address to the NFU should have begun with an outright apology. The Westminster Government have hammered farmers with their Brexit obsession, leaving them to fend for themselves in facing the devastating impact of higher costs, mountains of red tape, labour shortages and eyewatering delays over border controls.

[Wendy Chamberlain (North East Fife) (LD)]

Alongside my right hon. Friend the Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael), I am grateful to be here as a Scottish MP who can also give a voice to Scottish farmers. The hon. Gentleman is making good points on Brexit, and I agree with him, but does he agree with me on the importance of skills for farming and having training where the communities are? Scotland’s Rural College received a Queen’s anniversary award for innovation a couple of weeks ago, and I was in London to see that, but the SRUC Elmwood campus in Cupar is facing devastating cuts, largely as a result of the Scottish Government’s cuts to higher and further education. Its golf course will be sold off, and there are doubts over the future of its animal care unit. Does he agree that the SRUC is an integral part of Cupar and that the Scottish Government should be helping the SRUC with funding to keep it there as a going concern?