If one were to be asked for a prime example of Labour incompetence then you would be hard pressed finding something as far-reaching or expensive as their “handling” of the 2001 foot and mouth (FMD) crisis. So unbelievably “naff” was their inept and disproportionate response to this outbreak that many a farmer, even today, believes that malice played a role. The conservative British farmer, after all, has long been one of Labour’s Marxist “class-enemy” bogeymen! The combination of the FMD and Labour pestilence not only led to the slaughter of millions of perfectly healthy beasts but also dealt a crippling blow to what had been a thriving industry, putting many out of business.

Labour’s FMD debacle was followed by their appalling apathy towards the growing plight of dairy farmers. Whilst the Government allowed supermarket cartels and dairies to reduce the farm gate price of milk to less than the cost of production - the Government deliberately remained aloof from the resulting crisis. No surprise then that well run farms went bust the length and breadth of Britain. Such was the despair in the industry that some producers, facing insurmountable debt and the loss of both their livelihood and home, took their own lives! Quite apart from these localised tragedies, many struggling older farmers sold up and retired, whilst their sons and daughters, seeing no future in farming, abandoned the industry in favour of the relative stability of regular paid employment!

This entirely avoidable mess was swiftly followed by the shambles surrounding the introduction of the Single Farm Payments (SFP) system, where the Rural Payments Agency (RPA), acting on behalf of Labour’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), was charged with distributing some £1.5 billion of EU subsidies to British farmers. So incompetent (some think deliberately so) was the implementation of the scheme that only 15% of farmers received their cheques on time - in March 2006! Although the majority of farmers received payments by the end of that year, many thousands were still waiting well into 2007 for their subsidy money - more than a year after they were supposed to have been paid! This delay inevitably resulted in cash-strapped farmers going cap in hand to the banks, to arrange expensive bridging loans or to “top-up” existing ones. In no few cases, growing indebtedness and a sense of hopelessness resulted in a further tranche of farmers quitting the industry.

Now, summer 2008, we discover that Labour’s RPA has overpaid thousands of farmers to the tune of an estimated £38 million. This money will now have to be clawed back from the unsuspecting recipients. This is all very well if the money is sitting in bank accounts unspent. But, as it is entirely likely, much of this cash will have already been ploughed back into the business - perhaps into new plant or towards paying off existing bank loans, for instance - meaning then it is entirely likely that affected farmers will now have to return to the banks to arrange fresh interest-bearing credit to tied then over! Yet more profits for the banks, yet more misery for the farmer!

Meanwhile, as farmers continue to leave the industry at a time of historically high land prices, developers, giant agricultural combines and supermarket cartels hover, like vultures, to buy up even more ruined formerly family owned farms.

Whereas the Labour regime has put the farming industry through the wringer in recent years and driven thousands, of formerly successful family run farms to the wall - it would be wrong to think that there haven’t been winners. Those doing very nicely out of this crescendo of crises include the big property development companies - hungry for building land, the supermarket cartels - anxious to add to their land holdings and, of course, the giant agricultural enterprises - determined to turn farmland into depopulated featureless GM-growing prairies. A list that would be incomplete without the addition of the Labour Party itself - the recipient of donations from certain grateful commercial interests!

Labour’s mismanagement of farming - misfortune or design?