‘It’s a once-in-a-generation opportunity’
Simon Hart
Across the UK, we share great pride in our countryside and our exit from the EU allows us to harness that pride in a way that we have not been able to for more than 40 years—pride not only in food production, but in land management and the people who quietly care for this unique national asset.
Nor should our attachment to rural matters be simply aesthetic. Britain is renowned for its leading role in the Industrial Revolution, but many overlook the leading role we played in the earlier agricultural equivalent.
The way we farmed and managed our land was transformed through the sheer brilliance of visionary British minds, something that is rarely mentioned when tackling today’s challenges. As my colleague George Eustice, the Defra Secretary, has recently laid out, the once-in-a-generation opportunity that we face today cannot be missed.
In a speech to the Oxford Farming Conference in November, Mr Eustice explained how we need to reinvent farming policy so that it is not only right for today’s custodians of the countryside, but for those of tomorrow. The ‘policy’ responsibility for these changes is shared by the UK Government and the devolved administrations, but the implementation required will be down to the ingenuity of farmers and land managers. It was ever thus.
The collective concern is that we introduce compatible systems that create a level playing field across the four home nations. Although some difference can be positive, untrammelled divergence post-Brexit is unlikely to end well. With this in mind, the UK Government has legislated to protect the UK internal market to keep trade flowing seamlessly between the nations. That will come as no surprise to most businesses, but it did need to be enshrined in law.
この記事は Country Life UK の January 13, 2021 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です ? サインイン
この記事は Country Life UK の January 13, 2021 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
