Peter Kendall – bye bye!

I’ll let you into a couple of secrets – although neither may come as a surprise to you.

First, I’ll miss Peter Kendall (a bit). Everyone deserves to have a pantomime villain to boo and Peter has thrown himself into that role with gusto for eight years.  We’ll have to see whether the new NFU hierarchy will want to show a more environmentally friendly face to the world but they could hardly show one less friendly.  We’ll see.

Second, when I am occasionally struggling for inspiration on what to write about here I have had three staple foods: Red Kites (aren’t they wonderful – and there was one over the garden just now), the fantastic BTO Cuckoo project and Peter Kendall’s most recent outburst.  Yes, I’ll miss him a bit.

Today, demonstrating that doublespeak is alive and well Kendall says ‘We have to put lives and human safety first but we have to put a higher priority on agricultural land as well‘. I notice Kendall is not calling for more money to be spent on flood defence overall so how we defend towns and people and then give higher priority to farmland too is a bit difficult to figure out.  Where we can be quite clear that the NFU does not want money spent is on wildlife and habitat solutions to flooding despite these being supported by NFU locally in South West England as Kendall today said ‘We have turned our waterways into wildlife habitats and we have stopped clearing them.‘.

Well, let’s just consider that statement. Didn’t many waterways start as habitats and we have degraded them? And that degradation has not always been to our own advantage when it comes to flood defences or water quality.  And the majority of wetland species are declining in range or numbers according to the State of Nature report – so that’s another nature reserve which isn’t performing too well!

I’d advise Peter to stay out of Devon for  a while – he has succeeded in upsetting both farmers and nature conservationists there.  I was interested to read this from former NFU Livestock Chair Richard Haddock and also this from the Chief Executive of the Devon Wildlife Trust.

Peter Kendall has been a highly successful NFU President. He is an accomplished lobbyist and has got quite a lot of things that he wanted for farming. And he has been re-elected three times which is no mean feat and suggests that he has been giving farmers what they wanted.  It will be interesting to see where he pops up next and whether the new NFU hierarchy can achieve as much as Peter, annoy as much as Peter and be as environmentally unfriendly as often as Peter.

Will the new NFU President, whoever it is, be a pantomime villain too? Oh no he isn’t! Oh yes he is! We’ll see.

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