The lessons of the World War II melded Britain into a social-democratic state. Economic liberalism was abandoned in favour of nationalised utilities, transport and healthcare. It is often forgotten that agriculture was socialised, too.
The rise of socialised agriculture
Following the repeal of the Corn Laws in the mid-19th century, Britain had imported food at world dump prices to keep industrial wages low and the products from our factories competitive at export. This meant that the national diet was exceptionally poor, with concerning implications for the health of urban workers. It also meant that British farmers were unable to compete. Between 1870 and 1939, with a brief respite in the latter years of World War 1, British farming faced a savage depression.
To avoid famine, from 1939 the government demanded a plough-up campaign from British farmers. Through rationing, produce was distributed evenly, and the health of the people improved. The social benefits of healthy diets comprising fresh food were obvious, and with the 1947 Agriculture Act, the Labour Party made support for domestic agriculture a key tenet of the post-war system. A productive agricultural sector would work with the new National Health Service – agriculture would facilitate health through nutrition, while nationalised hospitals would treat disease.
The farming subsidies granted by the Labour Party and maintained through the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) were never to benefit farmers, but were intended for the good of the entire population. The socialist ideology behind the subsidies can be seen in Labour Peer Christopher Addison’s 1931 A Policy for British Agriculture. As a medical doctor, Addison saw domestic agriculture as the key to improving public health, which the pre-war libertarian food policy had sorely neglected.
These policies also helped farmers, as workers, to own their own land. Since the British Agricultural Revolution, the aristocracy had largely retained ownership of their land, as landlords to their farmer tenants. But Labour’s policies supported owner-occupying farmers and encouraged worker-ownership of the means of production. With less exploitation through tenancy, workers in the countryside would produce nutritious food for their fellow-workers in the cities.
The shift to neoliberalism
Yet in a strange twist of fate, this socialist settlement for the countryside is being aggressively unravelled by the very party that implemented it. During Michael Gove’s stint as DEFRA secretary, a neoliberal vision of the food system emerged in government. He argued that agricultural subsidies distorted the market, stifled innovation, and incentivised low productivity. He wrote that the CAP “bids up the price of land, distorting the market, creating a barrier to entry for innovative new farmers and entrenching lower productivity”. Farms, he argued, had become unprofitable and relied on these subsidies. They needed to innovate in order to make efficiency gains.
And these food subsidies were a burden on the treasury. Gove believed that if land values could be reduced, it would become viable for new people who were innovative enough to survive without support, to enter farming. This fails to consider that land values are kept high by demand from the financial sector. House building, natural capital, solar panels, biodiversity, net gains and tax avoidance are all more lucrative than farming. Gove also made the mistake of equating profitability with efficiency.
On our 120-acre Leicestershire farm, we were milking cows (we gave up after Brexit) to produce milk at 17p per litre. This was not profitable, but it was incredibly efficient, as we could produce a litre of remarkably nutritious food for only 17p. This efficiency was demanded by the processing companies who, in a loosely regulated market, were free to alter our contracts and demand that we produce milk at that price. We were efficient precisely because we were unprofitable. We had no other choice.
Despite this, Gove sought to reduce land prices by offering farmers a lump sum to give up. If this triggered lots of land sales, prices would surely fall and allow new entrants. He also cancelled the old food subsidies and replaced them with the Sustainable Farming Incentive, which leaves food production to the free market but offers farmers payments for select ‘environmental services’ that the market might not provide.
The Labour Party’s new agricultural vision
These were the policies Steve Reed, Labour’s DEFRA secretary, inherited when he took office. With 17% of the British population food-insecure, according to government figures, and 30% of farms operating at a loss, food inflation is fuelling the country’s economic struggles. Yet Reed has continued to pursue Gove’s neoliberal vision.
“There is no place in the future for a sector that is unprofitable”, Reed told the NFU conference in February. “Farmers will have to learn to do more with less.” His subordinate, Daniel Zeichner, has told parliament that farmers cannot expect to be supported by the government forever. Where is the concern for social responsibility? The benefits of healthy food? The environment? The situation of farmers as workers?
Gove’s offer of a lump sum was seen by the industry as passive-aggressive, so had little uptake. Yet Labour is seeking the same end – to drive unprofitable, ‘inefficient’ farmers from their land – through an unpayable inheritance tax on the unrealised value of the capital we need to produce food. And they have introduced measures to expropriate our land at below market value for housing and rewilding to offset the environmental damage caused by this construction work.
What does the rise of corporate control mean for family farms?
In our place, Labour is incentivising factory farming. The SFI was unexpectedly closed without notice in mid-March, and the rise of the food-producing corporation is on the rise. Cranswick PLC is seeking to build a battery ‘mega-farm’ in Norfolk. This will harm our diets and the environment. Labour’s neoliberalism seems to apply beyond our shores, too: the party seeks to sink a judicial review by an organisation called Feedback of the environmental impact of Boris Johnson’s Australian free trade agreement by removing a cost-capping order. This is a return to the 1930s food system that undermined the health of the working class.
A fight for our communities and food system
Farmers are fighting for survival at the moment. But we’re also fighting for our communities. Our food standards. Our environment, both as an amenity and to keep our diets environmentally sustainable. We’re fighting individualism. And we’re fighting against corporate control of resources. We’re fighting for affordable, nutritious food for the people.
We are not the right wing people here. The right wing people are the Labour Party. They are not communists; they don’t want state control of land. They’re not socialists; they don’t want worker-ownership of the means of production as they did in 1947. They are neoliberals; they want a free market in the countryside.
They are ‘corpocrats’. They want corporations to provide us with food, houses and nature through natural capital. They are not leading us constructively to a vision of a better future. What they are doing is destructive. They are destroying what currently exists without replacing it with anything other than libertarianism. And all that does is allow the rich to get richer at the expense of everybody else.
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