Where There's Muck, There's Votes

The supermarkets are not now going to pay the farmers until a whopping ninety days, and even then are going to charge a fee to be deducted from the invoice. A fee for condescending to pay for goods received on commercial terms!

The “free” market, with its big business that behaves like this, destroys everything that conservatives exist in order to conserve, including agriculture and small business. Yet somehow, even the post-Thatcher Tories (not that the other two are any better) have managed to present themselves as the ancestral political voice of the countryside, contrary to the plain facts of history.

Well, no more. The cause of the working and lower middle classes created by the Industrial Revolution is, and has always been, the cause of the farm labourers and the smallholders (or even many quite largeholders) as well. And now, that cause has a party, linked to below.

The supermarkets should be made to fund investment in agriculture and small business (investment to be determined in close consultation with the National Farmers’ Union and the Federation of Small Businesses) by means of a windfall tax, to be followed if necessary by a permanently higher flat rate of corporation tax. In either case, strict regulation must ensure that the costs of this are not passed on to suppliers, workers, consumers, communities or the environment.

Real agriculture is the mainstay of strong communities, environmental responsibility and animal welfare (leading to safe, healthy and inexpensive food), as against American-style ‘factory farming’. It is closely connected to the defence of the remaining field sports, and it calls for a free vote in government time on repeal of the ban on hunting with dogs.

Overarching all of this is the need to defend rural services, and in particular for the systematic reversal of bus route and (where possible) rail line closures going back to the 1950s, as well as of the erosion of local schools, medical facilities, Post Offices, and so on. A national network of public transport, free at the point of use, is required.

As is a new and powerful second chamber elected on the basis of the English ceremonial counties, Scottish lieutenancy areas, Welsh preserved counties, and Northern Irish counties, with each of those 99 units having equal representation.

There is now a party advocating all of this. Be part of it.