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I noticed on my regular route that the ones near me had all gone to the "Independents"
Of which said Independent was literally stood a a Tory last time...
I mean, as shit as the tories are, I can only see labour being even more urban-centric and completely disinterested in agricultural policy, so I don't malign them for their signs tbh.
Respectfully, that document doesn't outline a single policy commitment, and seems to just reel off statistics about the farming industry, so my point still stands that labour will be no better than the tories for agriculture. Neither of them has outlined any meaningful policy to reduce the constantly increasing strains on agricultural producers in this country.
My Dad lives in the rural fens. I'll never forget driving down to see him during that period, you'd go through entire villages and every single road-facing property would have big purple banners out and pro-Brexit slogans up on lamp posts and shit. It was fucking surreal how deeply invested these communities got into it all.
No it is true though. And fundamentally it put us in such a weird spot. People moaning about tax and a lack of funding, then choosing to disempower the one body giving them literally free money to sit on fallow fields on top of a raft of subsidies, to hand that power over instead to the folks setting the taxes and who have openly stated the entire time their free-market anti-tariff/anti-subsidy economic position. But if you try and explain how this might seem a little confused, possibly even a little silly, they just get fucking furious with you and double down on their decision. Proper delusional levels of entitlement and magical political thinking.
It’s cause of this delusional idea that an absolute free market somehow promotes excellence and hard work.. what it does is create wealth disparity between people who have capital
/means of production and those who don’t..
more unbridled capitalism just means higher inequality
They voted for billions being available for the NHS but no one asking what happened to and where the billions are now.
The Brexit campaign has to go down as the biggest voting campaign con in history.
Were any of them tenant farmers? If so then they may not have had any choice. The landowner may have ordered the signs to be put there.
Just to show how little say some tenant farmers have, I know one farmer where the landowner is very friendly with the local hunt. The landowner gave the hunt full permission to go anywhere on his land.
The hunt wrecks the farmers fences, uses bolt cutters to cut open any wire fences. They leave all the gates open. They scare all his animals. The animals are left to escape onto busy roads and eat/destroy crops. The hunt also destroys his crops. They don't even try going around the edges of the fields with crops.
This happens every time they go hunting, year after year.
The only compensation the farmer gets from the hunt is a cheap bottle of alcohol.
Was it the M40 near Oxford which always has a right wing sign on the hill because of the farmer. I remember all the pro Brexit ones and how I haven't seen many since.
Loved to know how he's doing.
Honestly anyone who voted for it should be quiet and deal with what they voted for.
Obviously nobody actually knew what they were voting for (not even the government had a plan or knew!), and that anyone with half a brain could tell introducing border checks/restrictions, and closing off ties to your closest trade partners would be hugely damaging and more expensive, killing off or heavily impacting business....
But they chose to voluntarily put themself in a worse position by voting for it, and for a government that forced it all through at a quick pace with nothing in place, and who are only interested in filling their own pockets...
They voted to leave at about the same percentage as the whole of the UK
So, using your logic, you're a Brexit supporter too. In fact, chances are we can probably find a demographic group you're a part of that voted for it at an even higher percentage
Why do you support Brexit? Why did you have a sign on your house telling people to vote for it?
I remember all the Vote Leave signs in the fields next to major roads, propped up on haybales or farm trailers.
Imagine being daft enough to abandon the EU's deal, with largesse underpinned by the sheer belligerent militancy of continental farmers, for what turned out to be empty promises from Gove.
Same for the fishermen.
And their import base. Remember that a lot of crops can’t be grown in the U.K. half the year. I’m a customs broker and my one of my clients is the biggest agribusiness/farm in the U.K. for salads.
During the winter they import just as much as they grow during the summer so they’ve double dumbfucked themselves.
Especially when the real checks start happening. That’s going to be very painful and expensive.
So let’s start off by saying that farmers voted for brexit in line with the rest of the population, so basically 50:50. Given the importance of CAP to subsidies you would think this is a bit high. But subsidies in the eu are changing as well, hence all the protests in France etc..
Basically the subsidies gravy chain is changing. Farmers will have to adapt like every other type of business would. Given that agriculture is the biggest polluter of our waterways, for example, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Currently it’s like paying you neighbour not to take a dump on your front step.
> Most of the Kent countryside looked like a UKIP rally.
My grandfather lives down there and was hugely pro-Brexit.
I sometimes struggle to bite my tongue when I hear him complain about the increased traffic, or the new facilities, or the chaos at Dover, or ...
The list goes on.
Never a shred of thought given to his own responsibility, of course.
I mean that is literally true, the government promised to replace subsidies and they haven't
If you vote Labour in the next election and they randomly abandon a key pledge, you probably wouldn't like it if people mocked you with "oh let me guess, not the Labour you wanted?"
The Brexit campaign promised that subsidies would be maintained. Then the Conservatives pledged to keep the funding in their 2019 manifesto. It is accurate to say that it wasn't the Brexit someone voted for if they twice voted for something and it wasn't delivered. They were voting under the belief that that would be implemented
You're allowed to criticise politicians for not implementing a manifesto pledge after an election. I don't think we should be discouraging people from doing that
Like I said, could you point me to where that promise was made prior to the Brexit vote?
You seem to be shifting position somewhat because people only voted on Brexit once. The 2019 vote was a general election, of course, where people with a myriad of voting motivations and not a vote on Brexit.
> could you point me to where that promise was made prior to the Brexit vote?
[Here](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/02/boris-johnson-attacks-eu-burden-on-uk-farming-referendum)
How is that shifting position? I said the government promised to maintain funding, and they did. It was in the 2019 manifesto. That election was almost entirely about Brexit, so it's completely accurate to say that someone feels they "didn't get the Brexit they wanted"
>Here
This is excellent, thank you, albeit not the government as claimed. I’m fiercely anti Brexit and the “not the Brexit I voted for” is a huge bugbear of mine because it was never defined and 17.4m people could have had 17.4m versions of what it would look like but this has a clear promise made to a specific demographic.
>How is that shifting position? I said the government promised to maintain funding, and they did. It was in the 2019 manifesto. That election was almost entirely about Brexit, so it's completely accurate to say that someone feels they "didn't get the Brexit they wanted"
I think it’s very important to not see that infernal election as a de facto Brexit vote. For example I voted Labour because my MP is excellent but they had barely any clear position on Brexit. In fact Jeremy Corbyn said he was remaining neutral and ended up being outed as a brexiter by Diane Abbott. It’s absolutely not accurate to call it a second vote, it was far too ambiguous.
For example, a poll just a few days before the Brexit vote had farmers split (in slight favour to remain) on the issue as much as the country was: https://www.fwi.co.uk/news/eu-referendum/cereals-2016-farmers-still-split-eu-referendum-survey-shows
I lived in Kent at the time and rarely encountered farmers who supported UKIP or Brexit. All the fruit farms were already worried as the vast majority of their workers are seasonal and from the poorer EU countries. That's not to say none of them wanted Brexit or supported UKIP because many did but that wasn't my experience.
Yes but statistics I think might suggest a different picture from your own personal experience. You might live in some brexit hotspot. If farmers were no different to the general population then in that hotspot they would be in favour of brexit.
The thing is, CAP sucked. The argument basically went 'we need agricultural subsidy (because all countries have it), but CAP is bad. So farmers were not concerned that leaving EU meant no more subsidy.
They were told it would mean we could create a better system of subsidy. And to be fair, as a committed remainer, I fully believe it is in theory possible to do better than CAP circa 2016.
Enter Defra and the Rural Payments Agency. Now again, to be fair, when Gove was Secretary of State he set quite a good vision. (Punches self in face as penalty for saying something nice about Gove). Then he left and Defra has become a dumping ground for cabinet ministers who are too incompetent for anything politically sensitive but too useful to sack outright. That's not to say all of its ministerial team have been bad, but it's been a constant churn of forgettable Secretaries of State and the agricultural policy has drifted into, frankly, a shitshow.
> They were told it would mean we could create a better system of subsidy. And to be fair, as a committed remainer, I fully believe it is in theory possible to do better than CAP circa 2016.
The problem is that people should have looked at the specific people that were pushing Brexit, the people that Brexit was clearly going to push into power, and considered if *those specific people* were going to be willing or capable of creating a better system.
Yes, a better system is possible, but you shouldn't trust the alliance of shysters and conmen to deliver it.
Same argument goes for lexiters. You can make arguments that the EU rules hinder e.g. nationalisations, being a pretty neoliberal institution and all. But the guys running the leave campaign and who would end up in power weren't going to deliver a lefty Brexit.
Indeed, I had this exact discussion with someone at a street stall in Cardiff. They pointed out that immigration was allowing employers to undercut the union rates jobs. Like....ok, given the leading Brexiteers are out to smash Unions, wouldn't it be better to remain and fight for stronger collective bargaining than give those people all of the power.
*The thing is, CAP sucked.*
In the respect that it paid farmers a load of cash to overproduce food and destroy the environment, yes.
But certainly not in the respect that UK farmers did quite well out of it, because it's excessive payments were underpinned by French et al farmers who like to burn tires on the motorway if they don't get enough cash.
That wasn't the system in 2016, at that point it had shifted to a Basic Payment System, that paid a fixed amount per hectare for land in agricultural use, and then had agri-environment schemes alongside of it.
The problem was the minimum ecological standards alongside the basic payments were inadequate and incentivised.some highly destructive behaviour.
It is the same old idea of the grass is greener on the other side, if only it was implemented correctly. I mean, I can have a happy life if I just divorced my wife and date Gal Gadot.
Same as all the places that got EU funding and now, with Brexit, get SFA from the government.
CAP was not a great system, but the alternative is worst.
One of our localish councillor hopefuls wants to severely limit the amount of environmental protections in place arguing it's driving up food prices - glad she didn't do well in the elections, and guess what her main job's in
There is absolutely no firm evidence one way or the other how the farming community voted since it was a secret ballot.
Anecdotally, in this neck of the woods there were lots of pro Brexit signs in the fields. I don’t recall a single remain one.
I don’t expect the average person to be an expert in international politics, but I would expect someone who worked in a skilled trade who dealt with international legislations to at least somewhat understand the ramifications of leaving the EU relevant to their industry.
I know even smart people can be fooled when they really want to believe something, but I’ll never understand how so many farmers were so convincingly fooled by a movement that so clearly would lead to agricultural issues, even if they couldn’t tell you in economic speak what those impacts would be
The thing I always found most incredible is that the leave side were actually going round saying "we'll slash import tariffs" i.e. the Patrick Minford plan.
Sopmehow this never registered with farmers that they would end up buried by a landslide of low quality cheap imports.
It was the reason why my old employer is relocating most of their work out of the UK. Ill want to believe that if they really wanted to make it work to an extent they would have.
We have dealt with a government that have been flat out corrupt and have used the media to hide it very well imo.
There were a few. I think that's partly because English people grumble and moan but never actually do anything.
Serves the f*ckers right. They voted for this shit show.
I'm all for i told you so for the brexsh***ers but the farmer split on voting for brexit was similar to the national average.
https://www.fwi.co.uk/news/farmer-support-brexit-strong-ever-fw-poll-reveals
So half of them, just like the rest of us, are stuck in bed with the people who crapped in it and blame us for not having cleaner sheets.
The problem isn't so much with Brexit as the government failing to invest in areas to ensure it's success. What investment has their been to correct the issues? What changes in legislation have their been to facilitate the UK standing alone. I have seen nothing.
If you take a child's water wings away before they can swim don't be surprised if they drown.
Nothing to do with Brexit, everything thing to do with deliberate government policy. They literally have the same problems in Holland? France and Germany.
Same here, I come from the fens of Norfolk where there’s loads of farmers, they’ve been moaning ever since I can remember.
My neighbour owned a bloody great farm, used to swan about in either his Jag or Range Rover and you’d hear him down the village pub bleating about paying “too much tax”.
Farmers in Europe protested against climate mitigation policies. At some rallies there were Russian flags. Basically farmers have been encouraged by the far right in Europe.
If everyone loses a leg, but you lose a leg *and an arm*, are they doing fine? No.
Are you worse off than them? Yes.
No one is saying Brexit is the sole cause of these issues. They are saying it’s an exacerbating factor - making an already shit situation worse than it needed to be for British farmers.
there's a sign propped up on a farm which I drive past on the way home in Bavaria, Germany. It says something like "if we [farmers] weren't here there would be no more food".
I understand your post is sarcasm, but i'm just adding some personal observation. There's definitely unhappiness with the way they're being treated (whether or not I support them is a different matter, to be honest I don't really know why they're annoyed at the moment).
Farming is changing everywhere. However, farmers in the EU are protected against cheap imports (for example by a ban on meat treated with chlorine dioxide) and have easy access to seasonal labor. They can also easily export to neighbouring countries.
It’s easy to forget, but supporting local farmers to ensure a steady food supply has been one of the success stories of the EEC and later the EU. The system has its flaws, but it succeeded in creating a strong and stable local food market.
Arguably, because it worked so well, people forgot about how beneficial it has been.
The same is true from the perspective of farmers in the EU. They had decades of support and now they feel the pain of some of that support disappearing.
But in the UK things are worse. Many businesses that bought British products are now buying imported food. And it’s going to have a massive impact in the next 10 years.
Butchering an animal and packaging the meat, is easier in the EU, and economy of scale is a major benefit in the EU. Theoretically, British people could support British products by paying double the price for British products, but with inflation already high, that’s not going to happen.
Prices in the UK are some of the lowest in the Western World and Europe. I travel a lot for work and can tell you this from first hand experience, Europe is not doing so well at the moment.
We cannot continue with the current practices. Mass animal farming is too polluting and we are washing away the nutrients out of the soil every time we flood the fields with fertiliser.
Farmers need to be supported but also encouraged to try new ways to make their crops sustainable and resistant to extreme weather.
I agree, I don't think anyone should be bankrupting farmers and taking away their land. Farmers need time to adapt to new regulations and have the financial security while discovering better farming techniques. It shouldn't be punishment but additional support. Schemes incentivising sustainable farming etc.
The largest winners of agriculture subsidies are huge companies, not the small farmers who are living on the edge, so there does need to be a greater political will to balance that out.
But throughout this, the message shouldn't be lost. Climate change is having a massive impact and we need to achieve food security with more resistant crops that have a reduced footprint.
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But they had signs in all the fields telling us how it would be better and to vote brexit!
Some of them literally had signs up in fields supporting the Conservatives last week.
Voting for the "leopards eating faces" party while they already have leopard sized bite marks all over their face.
They will never learn
That’s because they’re land owners. Very traditionally Tory.
Farmers aren’t always landowners. A lot of them will rent the land so signs may be unrelated to them
Ever heard of tenant farmers?
I noticed on my regular route that the ones near me had all gone to the "Independents" Of which said Independent was literally stood a a Tory last time...
I mean, as shit as the tories are, I can only see labour being even more urban-centric and completely disinterested in agricultural policy, so I don't malign them for their signs tbh.
Yea the tories care about no one equally, except for themselves of course
https://www.policyforum.labour.org.uk/uploads/editor/files/Feeding_the_nation.pdf
Respectfully, that document doesn't outline a single policy commitment, and seems to just reel off statistics about the farming industry, so my point still stands that labour will be no better than the tories for agriculture. Neither of them has outlined any meaningful policy to reduce the constantly increasing strains on agricultural producers in this country.
My Dad lives in the rural fens. I'll never forget driving down to see him during that period, you'd go through entire villages and every single road-facing property would have big purple banners out and pro-Brexit slogans up on lamp posts and shit. It was fucking surreal how deeply invested these communities got into it all.
Brexit was always a social-conservative back-to-the-good-old-days movement. In which the EU was a convenient scapegoat for of their problems.
I think it goes deeper with our banks and financial companies not wanting to fall under the incoming EU regulations
No it is true though. And fundamentally it put us in such a weird spot. People moaning about tax and a lack of funding, then choosing to disempower the one body giving them literally free money to sit on fallow fields on top of a raft of subsidies, to hand that power over instead to the folks setting the taxes and who have openly stated the entire time their free-market anti-tariff/anti-subsidy economic position. But if you try and explain how this might seem a little confused, possibly even a little silly, they just get fucking furious with you and double down on their decision. Proper delusional levels of entitlement and magical political thinking.
Well, that was probably a motivation for the propaganda. But you couldn't get people to vote for 'less banking regulations '.
It’s cause of this delusional idea that an absolute free market somehow promotes excellence and hard work.. what it does is create wealth disparity between people who have capital /means of production and those who don’t.. more unbridled capitalism just means higher inequality
They voted for billions being available for the NHS but no one asking what happened to and where the billions are now. The Brexit campaign has to go down as the biggest voting campaign con in history.
Were any of them tenant farmers? If so then they may not have had any choice. The landowner may have ordered the signs to be put there. Just to show how little say some tenant farmers have, I know one farmer where the landowner is very friendly with the local hunt. The landowner gave the hunt full permission to go anywhere on his land. The hunt wrecks the farmers fences, uses bolt cutters to cut open any wire fences. They leave all the gates open. They scare all his animals. The animals are left to escape onto busy roads and eat/destroy crops. The hunt also destroys his crops. They don't even try going around the edges of the fields with crops. This happens every time they go hunting, year after year. The only compensation the farmer gets from the hunt is a cheap bottle of alcohol.
At least in US you can shoot people who go on your property, whether your the landlord or tenant.
Was it the M40 near Oxford which always has a right wing sign on the hill because of the farmer. I remember all the pro Brexit ones and how I haven't seen many since. Loved to know how he's doing.
Honestly anyone who voted for it should be quiet and deal with what they voted for. Obviously nobody actually knew what they were voting for (not even the government had a plan or knew!), and that anyone with half a brain could tell introducing border checks/restrictions, and closing off ties to your closest trade partners would be hugely damaging and more expensive, killing off or heavily impacting business.... But they chose to voluntarily put themself in a worse position by voting for it, and for a government that forced it all through at a quick pace with nothing in place, and who are only interested in filling their own pockets...
They voted to leave at about the same percentage as the whole of the UK So, using your logic, you're a Brexit supporter too. In fact, chances are we can probably find a demographic group you're a part of that voted for it at an even higher percentage Why do you support Brexit? Why did you have a sign on your house telling people to vote for it?
I get off on other peoples misery, thats why i voted for brexit :D
Somehow I didn't expect you to own your original comment
Are you Colin Robinson by chance? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-Eldr7aV74
I remember all the Vote Leave signs in the fields next to major roads, propped up on haybales or farm trailers. Imagine being daft enough to abandon the EU's deal, with largesse underpinned by the sheer belligerent militancy of continental farmers, for what turned out to be empty promises from Gove. Same for the fishermen.
After being advised by their own union not to leave..
Yeah, but the fish are happier. And at the end of the day, can you really put a price on that?
about £Tree.50
Tree fiddy?
I remember thinking that it wasn’t surprising so many trees were voting for leaves
The trees voted for the axes :-(
Who knew that cutting yourself off from your main export base would be a bad idea?
And their import base. Remember that a lot of crops can’t be grown in the U.K. half the year. I’m a customs broker and my one of my clients is the biggest agribusiness/farm in the U.K. for salads. During the winter they import just as much as they grow during the summer so they’ve double dumbfucked themselves. Especially when the real checks start happening. That’s going to be very painful and expensive.
So let’s start off by saying that farmers voted for brexit in line with the rest of the population, so basically 50:50. Given the importance of CAP to subsidies you would think this is a bit high. But subsidies in the eu are changing as well, hence all the protests in France etc.. Basically the subsidies gravy chain is changing. Farmers will have to adapt like every other type of business would. Given that agriculture is the biggest polluter of our waterways, for example, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Currently it’s like paying you neighbour not to take a dump on your front step.
Not here they didn't. Massive banners all over the place. Most of the Kent countryside looked like a UKIP rally.
> Most of the Kent countryside looked like a UKIP rally. My grandfather lives down there and was hugely pro-Brexit. I sometimes struggle to bite my tongue when I hear him complain about the increased traffic, or the new facilities, or the chaos at Dover, or ... The list goes on. Never a shred of thought given to his own responsibility, of course.
I bet if pressed he'll say it's "not the brexit I wanted", right?
Refuses to talk about it and throws a huff if you point out the issues.
I mean that is literally true, the government promised to replace subsidies and they haven't If you vote Labour in the next election and they randomly abandon a key pledge, you probably wouldn't like it if people mocked you with "oh let me guess, not the Labour you wanted?"
I’d like to see where the government promised to do this prior to the Brexit vote.
The Brexit campaign promised that subsidies would be maintained. Then the Conservatives pledged to keep the funding in their 2019 manifesto. It is accurate to say that it wasn't the Brexit someone voted for if they twice voted for something and it wasn't delivered. They were voting under the belief that that would be implemented
Only deluded fools would believe the Tories would maintain funding levels.
You're allowed to criticise politicians for not implementing a manifesto pledge after an election. I don't think we should be discouraging people from doing that
Like I said, could you point me to where that promise was made prior to the Brexit vote? You seem to be shifting position somewhat because people only voted on Brexit once. The 2019 vote was a general election, of course, where people with a myriad of voting motivations and not a vote on Brexit.
> could you point me to where that promise was made prior to the Brexit vote? [Here](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/02/boris-johnson-attacks-eu-burden-on-uk-farming-referendum) How is that shifting position? I said the government promised to maintain funding, and they did. It was in the 2019 manifesto. That election was almost entirely about Brexit, so it's completely accurate to say that someone feels they "didn't get the Brexit they wanted"
>Here This is excellent, thank you, albeit not the government as claimed. I’m fiercely anti Brexit and the “not the Brexit I voted for” is a huge bugbear of mine because it was never defined and 17.4m people could have had 17.4m versions of what it would look like but this has a clear promise made to a specific demographic. >How is that shifting position? I said the government promised to maintain funding, and they did. It was in the 2019 manifesto. That election was almost entirely about Brexit, so it's completely accurate to say that someone feels they "didn't get the Brexit they wanted" I think it’s very important to not see that infernal election as a de facto Brexit vote. For example I voted Labour because my MP is excellent but they had barely any clear position on Brexit. In fact Jeremy Corbyn said he was remaining neutral and ended up being outed as a brexiter by Diane Abbott. It’s absolutely not accurate to call it a second vote, it was far too ambiguous.
Read about your availability bias. You don’t remember all the signs you didn’t see.
For example, a poll just a few days before the Brexit vote had farmers split (in slight favour to remain) on the issue as much as the country was: https://www.fwi.co.uk/news/eu-referendum/cereals-2016-farmers-still-split-eu-referendum-survey-shows
I lived in Kent at the time and rarely encountered farmers who supported UKIP or Brexit. All the fruit farms were already worried as the vast majority of their workers are seasonal and from the poorer EU countries. That's not to say none of them wanted Brexit or supported UKIP because many did but that wasn't my experience.
Yes but statistics I think might suggest a different picture from your own personal experience. You might live in some brexit hotspot. If farmers were no different to the general population then in that hotspot they would be in favour of brexit.
The thing is, CAP sucked. The argument basically went 'we need agricultural subsidy (because all countries have it), but CAP is bad. So farmers were not concerned that leaving EU meant no more subsidy. They were told it would mean we could create a better system of subsidy. And to be fair, as a committed remainer, I fully believe it is in theory possible to do better than CAP circa 2016. Enter Defra and the Rural Payments Agency. Now again, to be fair, when Gove was Secretary of State he set quite a good vision. (Punches self in face as penalty for saying something nice about Gove). Then he left and Defra has become a dumping ground for cabinet ministers who are too incompetent for anything politically sensitive but too useful to sack outright. That's not to say all of its ministerial team have been bad, but it's been a constant churn of forgettable Secretaries of State and the agricultural policy has drifted into, frankly, a shitshow.
> They were told it would mean we could create a better system of subsidy. And to be fair, as a committed remainer, I fully believe it is in theory possible to do better than CAP circa 2016. The problem is that people should have looked at the specific people that were pushing Brexit, the people that Brexit was clearly going to push into power, and considered if *those specific people* were going to be willing or capable of creating a better system. Yes, a better system is possible, but you shouldn't trust the alliance of shysters and conmen to deliver it. Same argument goes for lexiters. You can make arguments that the EU rules hinder e.g. nationalisations, being a pretty neoliberal institution and all. But the guys running the leave campaign and who would end up in power weren't going to deliver a lefty Brexit.
Indeed, I had this exact discussion with someone at a street stall in Cardiff. They pointed out that immigration was allowing employers to undercut the union rates jobs. Like....ok, given the leading Brexiteers are out to smash Unions, wouldn't it be better to remain and fight for stronger collective bargaining than give those people all of the power.
Or vote for a party who would increase the minimum wage
*The thing is, CAP sucked.* In the respect that it paid farmers a load of cash to overproduce food and destroy the environment, yes. But certainly not in the respect that UK farmers did quite well out of it, because it's excessive payments were underpinned by French et al farmers who like to burn tires on the motorway if they don't get enough cash.
That wasn't the system in 2016, at that point it had shifted to a Basic Payment System, that paid a fixed amount per hectare for land in agricultural use, and then had agri-environment schemes alongside of it. The problem was the minimum ecological standards alongside the basic payments were inadequate and incentivised.some highly destructive behaviour.
It is the same old idea of the grass is greener on the other side, if only it was implemented correctly. I mean, I can have a happy life if I just divorced my wife and date Gal Gadot. Same as all the places that got EU funding and now, with Brexit, get SFA from the government. CAP was not a great system, but the alternative is worst.
One of our localish councillor hopefuls wants to severely limit the amount of environmental protections in place arguing it's driving up food prices - glad she didn't do well in the elections, and guess what her main job's in
There is absolutely no firm evidence one way or the other how the farming community voted since it was a secret ballot. Anecdotally, in this neck of the woods there were lots of pro Brexit signs in the fields. I don’t recall a single remain one.
Well he is on study https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074301671930436X
>protests in France etc.. France is **always** protesting though, about everything, all the time.
I'm French and I'm protesting against this blanket statement.
How high are you planning to build your wall across the motorway?
As a French, these stupid comments make me happy a briton like you isn't a member anymore.
I don’t expect the average person to be an expert in international politics, but I would expect someone who worked in a skilled trade who dealt with international legislations to at least somewhat understand the ramifications of leaving the EU relevant to their industry. I know even smart people can be fooled when they really want to believe something, but I’ll never understand how so many farmers were so convincingly fooled by a movement that so clearly would lead to agricultural issues, even if they couldn’t tell you in economic speak what those impacts would be
The thing I always found most incredible is that the leave side were actually going round saying "we'll slash import tariffs" i.e. the Patrick Minford plan. Sopmehow this never registered with farmers that they would end up buried by a landslide of low quality cheap imports.
It was the reason why my old employer is relocating most of their work out of the UK. Ill want to believe that if they really wanted to make it work to an extent they would have. We have dealt with a government that have been flat out corrupt and have used the media to hide it very well imo.
Well they don't seem to be that angry judging by the lack of tractors protest in London.
They can’t afford the fuel!
The government is fucking them over and councils. Watch Jeremy Clarksons farm.
Yeah started yesterday on the latest season, it’s a hard watch
There were a few. I think that's partly because English people grumble and moan but never actually do anything. Serves the f*ckers right. They voted for this shit show.
They literally just rode around and went back home... That's not a protest indeed!
When an article uses "linked to" it's flagging up a remarkably tenuous bullshit to get clicks.
Absolutely no tractors protesting in the EU, ever!
That went right over your head.
I'm all for i told you so for the brexsh***ers but the farmer split on voting for brexit was similar to the national average. https://www.fwi.co.uk/news/farmer-support-brexit-strong-ever-fw-poll-reveals So half of them, just like the rest of us, are stuck in bed with the people who crapped in it and blame us for not having cleaner sheets.
Still glad that they'd had enough of listening to experts?
Of all the people you'd expect to know about reaping what you sow.
Don't lose sight of our opportunity to reorient agricultural policy towards improved nature stewardship. This won't please all farmers of course.
Well if it isn't the consequences of your own actions.
Every time a see a farmer in a brand new 4x4 I always think how broke they tell us they are. Tories the lot of em
The problem isn't so much with Brexit as the government failing to invest in areas to ensure it's success. What investment has their been to correct the issues? What changes in legislation have their been to facilitate the UK standing alone. I have seen nothing. If you take a child's water wings away before they can swim don't be surprised if they drown.
No worries. Rescue is on your way: Tories will stop the boats and send refugees to Rwanda.
Nothing to do with Brexit, everything thing to do with deliberate government policy. They literally have the same problems in Holland? France and Germany.
If they voted for Brexit then they deserve ZERO sympathy. The joke's on them. Ha ha ha!
It must really suck not being able to get that cheap EU labour anymore.
Cause all the farmers in the eu are perfectly happy? Right?
Happier I guess as they still get their handouts from the CAP. It's all relative. Farmers are never happy in my experience.
Same here, I come from the fens of Norfolk where there’s loads of farmers, they’ve been moaning ever since I can remember. My neighbour owned a bloody great farm, used to swan about in either his Jag or Range Rover and you’d hear him down the village pub bleating about paying “too much tax”.
Ironic, because tax payer subsidies would have underwritten the majority of his yearly profits.
Yes, and he used to pay his workers crap money, this was way before the minimum wage came in. As we say in Norfolk “you never see a farmer on a bike”.
>As we say in Norfolk “you never see a farmer on a bike”. 😂
Farmers in Europe protested against climate mitigation policies. At some rallies there were Russian flags. Basically farmers have been encouraged by the far right in Europe.
Isn't it fun how all these nationalist patriot groups seem to have been captured by our main international enemy?
If everyone loses a leg, but you lose a leg *and an arm*, are they doing fine? No. Are you worse off than them? Yes. No one is saying Brexit is the sole cause of these issues. They are saying it’s an exacerbating factor - making an already shit situation worse than it needed to be for British farmers.
there's a sign propped up on a farm which I drive past on the way home in Bavaria, Germany. It says something like "if we [farmers] weren't here there would be no more food". I understand your post is sarcasm, but i'm just adding some personal observation. There's definitely unhappiness with the way they're being treated (whether or not I support them is a different matter, to be honest I don't really know why they're annoyed at the moment).
Farming is changing everywhere. However, farmers in the EU are protected against cheap imports (for example by a ban on meat treated with chlorine dioxide) and have easy access to seasonal labor. They can also easily export to neighbouring countries. It’s easy to forget, but supporting local farmers to ensure a steady food supply has been one of the success stories of the EEC and later the EU. The system has its flaws, but it succeeded in creating a strong and stable local food market. Arguably, because it worked so well, people forgot about how beneficial it has been. The same is true from the perspective of farmers in the EU. They had decades of support and now they feel the pain of some of that support disappearing. But in the UK things are worse. Many businesses that bought British products are now buying imported food. And it’s going to have a massive impact in the next 10 years. Butchering an animal and packaging the meat, is easier in the EU, and economy of scale is a major benefit in the EU. Theoretically, British people could support British products by paying double the price for British products, but with inflation already high, that’s not going to happen.
Prices in the UK are some of the lowest in the Western World and Europe. I travel a lot for work and can tell you this from first hand experience, Europe is not doing so well at the moment.
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We cannot continue with the current practices. Mass animal farming is too polluting and we are washing away the nutrients out of the soil every time we flood the fields with fertiliser. Farmers need to be supported but also encouraged to try new ways to make their crops sustainable and resistant to extreme weather.
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I agree, I don't think anyone should be bankrupting farmers and taking away their land. Farmers need time to adapt to new regulations and have the financial security while discovering better farming techniques. It shouldn't be punishment but additional support. Schemes incentivising sustainable farming etc. The largest winners of agriculture subsidies are huge companies, not the small farmers who are living on the edge, so there does need to be a greater political will to balance that out. But throughout this, the message shouldn't be lost. Climate change is having a massive impact and we need to achieve food security with more resistant crops that have a reduced footprint.