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Green, Green Grass Under the Red Wall: It's Time the Left Engaged with Agriculture

  • Writer: Siwan Clark
    Siwan Clark
  • Jul 8, 2020
  • 7 min read



British farming is facing an existential threat.

In May, MPs rejected an amendment to the Agriculture Bill that would require food imports post-Brexit to meet UK standards, despite the amendment having the backing of an unprecedented coalition of environmental and agricultural interest groups. Those who voted to reject it – all of them Conservative MPs – argued that this was no reflection of their commitment to protect British farmers but was simply outside the scope of the bill: any concerns would be addressed in the Trade Bill or in bilateral trade deals. With grim predictability, subsequent leaks and announcements made clear that the UK will in fact capitulate to US demands on access to UK food markets for low-standard agriculture products, including chickens kept in such confinement that their faeces-caked carcasses must be dipped in chlorine dioxide to make them safe for human consumption.

With cheap US imports set to undercut UK farmers in the domestic food market, the government simultaneously seems intent on pursuing a no-deal Brexit that will collapse their export market, as Michael Gove formally announced last month that there will be no Covid-19 extension of the transition period. Boris Johnson might choose to describe this as a “very good option” but the combined impact of losing access to EU markets while cheap US imports are flooding the UK market will end British farming as we know it: the only farms able to survive will be the biggest, most intensive agri-businesses.

I wrote about the catastrophic effect this would have on Welsh farming in an article which launched Undod’s campaign to amend the Agriculture Bill in the House of Lords and save Welsh farms. While the campaign was well-received in Welsh-language and farming circles, I was shocked by the response in left-wing and Labour Party groups. Again and again, the comments came, “Farmers voted Brexit and Tory so I’m afraid my sympathy is limited.” This eagerness for collective punishment of an entire sector betrays a vindictiveness towards rural communities that I admit I had not expected.

What lies behind this knee-jerk antagonism towards farming?

…

With the decimation of local journalism, our often London-centric media has failed to engage in a meaningful way with the countryside. Rural economies are homogenised into “farmers” who in turn are homogenised into rich, Tory, Brexit-voting landowners.

Most obviously, this picture ignores the many working-class people employed on large farms and in intermediate industries such as animal feed production or machine maintenance. It is bizarre to encounter this preoccupation with landowners on the left; a foregrounding of “bosses” and their perceived morality above the livelihoods of the people that they employ. We do not apply this analysis to any other industry. Indeed, it is hard to think of any labour struggle or fight for job retention that would have qualified for the left’s support if our approval of the political ideologies of employers was the standard applied.

This is even more ludicrous in the context of the fight to amend the agriculture bill and safeguard our food standards. This is not a case of progressive reform being opposed by industry lobbyists on the basis of “saving jobs”, this is the government sacrificing our rural economies and our food security for the benefit of US agri-businesses which are some of the worst polluters, most aggressive monopolists, and most exploitative employers in the world.

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Even setting aside those employed in waged work in agricultural industries, the picture of all farmers as large, wealthy landowners is still inaccurate, particularly in Wales. Nearly half of holdings in Wales that applied for subsidies from the Welsh government comprised either partly or wholly tenanted land. For tenant farmers, whose tenancies can be contingent on making a certain proportion of their income from farming, life is precarious. Where the tenancy includes the farmhouse, a hit to farm profits can easily mean the loss of their home even if they are able to find other work.

Even owner-occupied farms in Wales are not comparable to the “barley barons” and mega-farms of England. The average size of a Welsh farm is half that of an English one, with over half of Welsh farms comprising just 20 hectares. This reflects a peculiarly Welsh industrial history where, unlike in many parts of England, the industrial revolution and enclosures in Wales saw an increase in subsistence smallholdings, with women often running the farm while men supplemented the family income working in quarries and mines, making their farms more like owner-occupied versions of Scottish crofts. Many of the traditionally Labour or Plaid Cymru constituencies in Wales can therefore not be classed as either industrial or rural, their constituents neither solely labouring or property owning, but a hybrid we have put too little effort into understanding.

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Just as the realities of (particularly southern) English farming are imposed on the Welsh context, the English story overshadows Wales in almost every discussion. The fixation on the “Red Wall” collapse in the post-industrial areas of Northern England erases the fact that Labour held onto every seat in the South Wales valleys. The determination of many in Labour to continue to view Plaid Cymru as the party of Welsh Nationalist Tories ignores the fact that the same constituencies have continued to return Plaid MPs despite the party’s significant move to the left over the past decades. This was particularly notable in 2015, when the party’s manifesto and leadership by Leanne Wood positioned it firmly to the left of Ed Miliband’s Labour Party.

In the most extreme example, the will of the Welsh people is literally obscured by the votes of English retirees, who seem to have played a key role in the Welsh votes both for Brexit – where Wales mirrored the nationwide 52:48 split – and for the Conservatives in 2019. Not only is Wales driven to the right, as in the North of England, by the exodus of its young people in the face of economic desolation but by an influx of older English voters.

…

This is not to indulge in the ethnic nationalist delusion that being Welsh somehow makes people inherently less reactionary, right-wing or racist; there is plenty of homegrown bigotry and imperial pride that white Welsh people must urgently grapple with. Nor is it to paint rural Wales as a progressive utopia; small-c conservatism and anti-environmentalism are plentiful. It is, however, to express a growing resentment that I and many Welsh people feel towards a liberal liberal media and political establishment that puts so little effort into learning about us, whilst accepting our disproportionate poverty, ridiculing our language, ignoring our diversity andcomplexity, and standing in judgement of our whole country on the basis of elections in which 30% of the population did not even vote.

Perhaps even more predictable than Boris Johnson’s betrayal of his rural voters is the apparent determination of the British establishment – on both the left and the right – to sleepwalk into a battle over Welsh independence with the same arrogance and complacent incuriosity that has handed the SNP 48 out of 59 Scottish seats in Westminster.

…

The discomfort I feel with dismissive or hostile responses to rural communities’ plight goes deeper than a frustration with city-dwellers’ or English ignorance. It cuts to the heart of what I believe to be the core of left-wing politics: the principle of solidarity and a commitment to the idea that every single person’s life has equal value. Writing off a whole industry, and therefore whole regions, as undeserving of support goes against this basic principle.

Wrexham, a town in North Wales and one of the most deprived places in the UK, is a constituency that voted Conservative in 2019 after almost a century of Labour MPs. A young friend of mine drove there from his family’s farm to campaign for Labour several times during the election. He is a person of colour. With racism emboldened in Wrexham after the Brexit referendum and in the wake of several violent assaults on Labour canvassers, his parents feared for his safety every time he went out. Wrexham Football Club fans are also part of a decades-old antifascist Celtic Alliance with Glasgow’s Celtic and Dublin’s Bohemians. They publish SHAG, an “Independent Socialist Republican Football Fanzine”, this month featuring Fred Hampton on the cover in honour of Black Lives Matter. As far-right football fans gathered across the country for a Black Lives Matter counter-protest in June, a group of Wrexham-supporting teenagers allegedly travelled to Manchester to fight the “statue protectors” there off the streets. Every single town in this country contains multitudes. Those who suffer most under this government will be the poor, the people of colour, and the socialists in the new “blue” areas.

To paraphrase Sarah Kendzior, there are no Leave or Remain areas, no red or blue areas; the UK is purple, purple like a bruise. As Welsh-Greek singer-songwriter Marina sings on To Be Human, “we’re united by our pain.” To divide our nation into good and bad areas according to a simplistic view of their politics and to treat the “bad” ones as disposable only serves the interests of those who would benefit from dividing us.

As Labour attempts to grapple with why it was abandoned by its traditional base, and those of us on the left seek to resist calls to become more reactionary and racist in order to regain it, it would be a huge mistake to pass up the opportunity to stand in solidarity with rural communities facing an existential threat. The abandonment of British farming by a Conservative party intent only on appeasing the USA and lining their cronies’ pockets also unmasks the empty promises of Boris Johnson’s Brexit. It is vital – strategically and morally - that the left seize control of the narrative and demonstrate our commitment to fighting for people struggling across the country.


Join Undod's campaign to amend the Agriculture Bill here: https://atalybilamaeth.wordpress.com







 
 
 

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