And so we say farewell to Liz Truss and Rory Stewart – both of whom were promoted in Theresa May’s reshuffle. Truss remains in the Cabinet and got the bigger job in Justice (never has a promotion been so unjust) and Rory Stewart is made Minister of State at International Development. Only George Eustice, the…
Category: Farming
Throwing CAP up in the air
Everything is in flux, but if we really are leaving the EU then the biggest conservation opportunity is bound to be through changing our financing of agriculture. We spend £3bn per annum on agricultural support at the moment (in England and Wales). We can spend more or less than that post Brexit because we…
Are farmers bonkers?
Tomorrow we will find out whether farmers, in the shape of the NFU, are completely bonkers? As has been rehearsed here already, some Brexiteers, including my MP, seem to think that we would continue to pay farmers lots of money just because we are in thrall to them, if we left the EU. This scenario…
If we left the EU…
My MP is keen that we should vote to leave the EU. He replied to me in a letter ‘This means that we currently send £50 million a day to the European union. If the UK was not in the EU, we could spend this money on farming and our public services, as we see…
Debate on floods (updated with links and quotes)
I watched the opposition day debate on the floods with interest – every minute of it. There were quite a lot of MPs, of both main political parties, taking the time to praise their constituents and to ask for promises of government money. Fair enough. Some of them were more subtle and convincing than others….