So, despite supporting Remain and an in out referendum on the actual deal instead of the referendum we had on promises and threats, I continue to believe there are plenty of things wrong with the EU and there are some areas of life where we can do a lot better outside than in. For example, I have never thought that the European Social Fund was a particularly effective method of supporting poorer regions to prosper. Owt is, however, better than nowt and the EU does at least have a regional policy whereas the UK government adopts the opposite approach. It likes to spend three times as much per person on infrastructure in London as it does in the north. A curious approach to rebalancing an economy.
When it comes to supporting British agriculture the evidence that EU schemes are clumsy bureaucratic and badly targeted is particularly strong. Any half way decent economist could have told the EU that if they introduced fixed payments for foods they would end up with wine and butter mountains. It took years to get that message across and cure a daft scheme. Then the EU went in for paying landowners for owning land. Taking taxes from people on zero hours contracts and giving them out as subsidies to the richest landowners in the country for doing nothing is not exactly a progressive scheme. Nor was it a particular success to pay farmers to work in environmentally friendly ways that were defined in a government office. Paying farmers to leave strips of land untouched for a couple of years might do a little bit to help wildflowers and encourage insect life but if those strips are right next to land that is soaked in chemicals it isn’t exactly going to produce wonderfully vibrant results. Especially if that land is only set aside for a couple of years.
So I was overjoyed this week to read of the success of a farm support scheme in Wensleydale that did things differently. Instead of paying farmers a subsidy simply for owning the land or adopting a particular method of farming the scheme works much more flexibly. The scheme pays farmers more if their fields support a wider variety of plants and doesn’t tell them how they should achieve that. All that happens is that the farmers are told which wildflowers will need to be found during an inspection visit and the more of those that they manage to raise on their pasture land the more money they get regardless of how they do it.
This sounds like the way forward and it is not surprising that Michael Gove sees schemes like this as the model on which he wants to shape Conservative Party farming policy. So there have been a lot of statements from him about how flexible and environmentally friendly UK farming policy is going to be in the wonderful world of Brexit. Alongside some staggeringly stupid comments from him about how lovely it is that global warming is enabling British wine growers to make the best sparkling white wine. And, of course, a complete cover up from him about how much damage cheap food imports of chemical drenched foodstuffs from mass produced US farmers will do to every farmer in the UK who wants to maintain any kind of decent standards of animal welfare or biodiversity. Along with an equally dramatic cover up from him over the fact that US farmers will be able to take the UK government to court to stop the UK government paying farmers any subsidies whatsoever. Oh, and the small fact that Michael Gove won’t always be responsible for farming and there are strong factions within the Conservative Party that want to scrap all subsidies or keep them focused on large wealthy farmers or grouse moor owners both of whom make large donations to the party.
Nevertheless, I did think that finally I had found one good reason why an important part of British life might be run a bit better when we were out of the EU. Until I read the small print. The scheme in Wensleydale is an EU funded scheme. It was a pilot that they were funding with a view to seeing whether they could change the whole basis of the way subsidies work across the whole of the EU. Put simply this scheme that has been trumpeted as an example of how much better things could be done outside the EU was in fact an example of the EU already doing things better. Such schemes could easily have been strengthened and widened by a UK government actively seeking to achieve change within the EU.
In other words, reform of the EU farming schemes isn’t just possible. It is already happening.
So smaller UK farmers might like to ask themselves one simple question. Are their interests going to be better protected by the strong small farming lobby inside the EU or by Michael Gove exposing them to fierce competition from US farmers using unsustainable mass production methods that will drive them out of business? I know where I would place my trust!