A friend forwards this, submitted by a friend of his to DEFRA:
Dear Secretary of State,
My friend, who is in farming at the moment, recently received a cheque for £3,000 from the Rural Payments Agency for not rearing pigs.. I would now like to join the "not rearing pigs" business.
In your opinion, what is the best kind of farm not to rear pigs on, and which is the best breed of pigs not to rear? I want to be sure I approach this endeavour in keeping with all government policies, as dictated by the EU under the Common Agricultural Policy.
I would prefer not to rear bacon pigs, but if this is not the type you want not rearing, I will just as gladly not rear porkers. Are there any advantages in not rearing rare breeds such as Saddlebacks or Gloucester Old Spots, or are there too many people already not rearing these?
As I see it, the hardest part of this programme will be keeping an accurate record of how many pigs I haven't reared. Are there any Government or Local Authority courses on this?
My friend is very satisfied with this business. He has been rearing pigs for forty years or so, and the best he ever made on them was £1,422 in 1968. That is - until this year, when he received a cheque for not rearing any.
If I get £3,000 for not rearing 50 pigs, will I get £6,000 for not rearing 100? I plan to operate on a small scale at first, holding myself down to about 4,000 pigs not raised, which will mean about £240,000 for the first year. As I become more expert in not rearing pigs, I plan to be more ambitious, perhaps increasing to, say, 40,000 pigs not reared in my second year, for which I should expect about £2.4 million from your department. Incidentally, I wonder if I would be eligible to receive tradable carbon credits for all these pigs not producing harmful and polluting methane gases?
Another point: These pigs that I plan not to rear will not eat 2,000 tonnes of cereals. I understand that you also pay farmers for not growing crops. Will I qualify for payments for not growing cereals to not feed the pigs I don't rear?
I am also considering the "not milking cows" business, so please send any information you have on that too. Please could you also include the current Defra advice on set aside fields? Can this be done on an e-commerce basis with virtual fields (of which I seem to have several thousand hectares)?
In view of the above you will realise that I will be totally unemployed, and will therefore qualify for unemployment benefits. I shall of course be voting for your party at the next general election.
Yours faithfully,
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This has been going the rounds in agricultural circles for at least a dozen years: I was working with farmers from 1997 for some years and I recall it being read out at a farming event very early in that experience.
ReplyDeleteIf it ever had any basis in fact (and as far as pig rearing is concerned, I'm pretty sure it never did), then it would have had to relate to the CAP in its pre-MTR (2002) days; it seemed to fade out in that part of the country which had any real knowledge of farming payments then.
Probably best to stay away from such dated stuff and stick to current reality!
I can assure you that this absolutely up to date. There was no DEFRA in 1997. This letter has only just been sent, because the event to which it refers has only just taken place.
ReplyDeleteDavid, I'm sorry but I promise you this is a spoof. The details etc of Depts change but it's been doing the rounds for years
ReplyDeleteAnd I promise you that he really has just sent this letter. Nice try, New Labour troll, of either party.
ReplyDeleteIf the same incompetences keep coming round, under Tory and Labour Governments alike, then the best that one can say is that that doesn't really come as any great surprise.
What David and La mean is that they remember cases like this years ago. So do I. Doesn't mean there aren't any now, though. No difficulty believing there are. Probably come across one soon.
ReplyDeletePoliticians and journalists are almost all very urban figures. Ones who think they understand the countryside only know about the posh side. This blog is a very important voice for people like tenant farmers, farm labourers, rural bus passengers, rural NHS users and so on. Keep up the good work.
Thank you, I will.
ReplyDeleteI will continue to try and give a voice to the tradition of:-
- those who have resisted enclosure, clearances, exorbitant rents, absentee landlordism, and a whole host of other abuses of the rural population down to the present day;
- those who organised farm labourers, smallholders, crofters and others in order to secure radical reforms;
- those who obtained, and who continue to defend, rural amenities such as schools, medical facilities, Post Offices, and so on. Of the county divisions that predominated among safe Labour seats when such first became identifiable in the 1920s;
- the working farmers who sat as Labour MPs between the Wars and subsequently;
- the Attlee Government’s creation of the Green Belt and the National Parks;
- those who opposed the destruction of the national rail and bus networks, and who continue to demand that those services be restored;
- those who have seen, and who still see, real agriculture as the mainstay of strong communities, environmental responsibility and animal welfare (leading to safe, healthy and inexpensive food) as against “factory farming”, and as a clear example of the importance of central and local government action in safeguarding and delivering social, cultural, political and environmental goods against the ravages of the “free” market;
- those who have fought, and who continue to fight, for affordable housing in the countryside, and for planning laws and procedures that take proper account of rural needs;
- those who object in principle to government without the clear electoral mandate of rural as well as of urban and suburban areas;
- those who have been and who are concerned that any electoral reform be sensitive to the need for effective rural representation, and that any new or reformed second chamber be equally representative of each of the 99 units that are the English ceremonial counties, the Scottish lieutenancy areas, the Welsh preserved counties, and the Northern Irish counties, and reflect the diversity of political opinion within each of them;
- Distributism and the related tendencies, and those who are conservationist rather than environmentalist.
I will therefore continue to campaign for, among so very many other things, help for farmers and small businesses through a windfall tax on the supermarkets, while defending village services, saving shooting and fishing, repealing the hunting ban, and making Gypsies and Travellers obey the same planning laws as the rest of us.
Oh, but some of the unprintable comments on this post have been priceless. That very similar pieces can be found on Google certainly does prove something. It proves that these and several other such problems keep presenting themselves over, and over, and over again. Who knew?
Here's the same letter, word for word, having been "sent" to David Milband earlier in 2009. One of the clues that it wasn't true even then was that DM was Foreign Secretary at the time...
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ephotozine.com/forums/topic/money-for-not-rearing-pigs-77453
It's not a spoof, we just have to keep copying and pasting the same letter because they keep making the same fucking mistake. As Farmer Giles says some people only know the toff's view of farming, the toffs make a hell of a lot of noise. But they are not at the sharp end. We are. So yes, if we keep being screwed over in exactly the same way then given half a chance to expose the incompetence of Defra and on back to MAFF we sure as hell take it. Trouble is, they never get the point. They keep getting the same letter word for word from all over the country but it never occurs to them to stop doing the stupid thing in the first place. Probably they think it's a spoof. It's not. They are. But not a very fucking funny one.
ReplyDeleteIs this is a spoof then David Lindsay knows it.
ReplyDeleteHe will have done this to get people to submit comments he won't let up, allowing him to say "Look, these Political Class/Fleet Street/BBC/Whitehall types assume that if people keep submitting the same complaint then it must be joke instead of a legitimate grievance, look how angry they get when I point this out, I couldn't possibly allow up the obscene comments from them, don't vote fir any of them, make alternative arrangements, i.e., vote for me."
The joke is on you if you have let him use you like that. I can see him now with a glass of something expensive in his hand, laughing himself silly at you.
Please do not swear on my blog.
ReplyDeleteIf Tom's was the one that you could let up then I take it you really did get a reaction?
ReplyDeleteOh, yes...
ReplyDeleteActually, I thought it was a spoof when I first read it. I had, I confess, much the motive attributed to me by Anonymous 22:22 (who has the present scene right, too - cheers).
But not only have I received a truly staggering number of unprintable comments just like that, I have also received at least as many very much like Tom's, as well as a number of emails such as lead me to expect a very great many by lunchtime tomorrow. I would like to thank everyone for them, even if many have been far too, er, choice and fruity to put up here.
Tom seems to speak for an awful lot of people, whom of course I knew existed, who are profoundly resentful of the domination of this area of policy by people who are no more typical of agriculture than of society in general.
And it really does seem to be the case that this letter is copied off the Internet and sent off every time that anyone has this situation, which seems to arise an awful lot. I am surprised on one level. But not on another.
You are a very wicked man, Mr. Lindsay. Goading those overeducated souls into a response is bad enough. But then goading them even further by not putting up their words of wisdom. They have never been treated like that in their lives. Who do you think you are? Truly the heir to Rod Liddle.
ReplyDeleteYet you seem to have come across a real problem unexpectedly and given a voice to otherwise voiceless people who have existed in this country for many centuries of forced silence under ignorant, absentee yokes. Truly the heir to Rod Liddle.
It will be many years yet before Rod needs to name, as Gore Vidal said of Christopher Hitchens, a dauphin or delfino.
ReplyDeleteWhat exactly was 'unprintable' about my comment, David?
ReplyDeleteWas it simply that I linked to a page from 2006 showing this exact same 'letter'?
A lot of other people did much the same thing, as I knew they would. I can only allow up so many. Basically, one.
ReplyDeleteAnd as much to my surprise (on one level) as anything else, it seems that that really doesn't prove anything. This problem occurs quite frequently, so those in the field, so to speak, copy and paste this letter, make the necessary tweaks, and send it off. A certain number inform the Internet that they have done so, and can therefore be found to have done so by means of Google.
Doubtless, there are many similar examples, of the recurring response to the recurring problem. There is a lot to be said for the aristocratic social conscience and for the leadership role of the gentry. But such are not the only voices of agriculture. They are far too often treated as if they were.
I'll believe that a recent payment was made for not rearing pigs if you can say under what provisions it has been made (I'm two years out of date on farming subsidies, but people I've checked with say the position has not changed - you can't get paid specifically for not raising pigs). I reckon you've been had.
ReplyDelete(I say 'specifically' to avoid the quibble of claiming it's a payment for doing something else with land which was previously used for raising pigs - like "getting paid for not selling tobacco" if a tobacconist changes his shop to sell food instead).
I'll ask, but I think this discussion has pretty much moved on. See the later post.
ReplyDelete