Brave new world? Or same old

The Government’s failure to be bold means that UK farming risks being neither competitive nor green

- Jamie Blackett

Is that it? After seven years’ anticipation or, perhaps, dread, the post-Brexit settlement looks remarkably like the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP): the same triumph of process over outcomes, the same overengineered hoops for farmers to jump through and, apparently, the same legion of civil servants to administer ‘public money for public goods’ (and for public servants’ salaries). Critically, most farmers are scratching their heads and wondering how they will balance the books when the impact of free trade hits.

History is repeating itself: the effects of the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 were not felt until 1870, as the Crimean War, then the American Civil War, kept commodity prices high in the way that covid followed by Putin’s war are doing following Brexit. When more normal terms of trade re-assert themselves, the fear is that we will be uncompetitive against imports produced without the same constraints, particularly in less perishable commodities such as grain and beef.

Most of the new ELMS options require farmers to grow less or spend money on something —they don’t actually provide much net subsidy. Particularly egregious is the lack of the ‘Swissstyle’ support that Brexiteers promised to upland farmers, whom they have acknowledged need protection. Whereas, at least in theory, the EU maintained a level playing field across the Single Market, the UK’s internal market looks as if it will have anything but.