The Conservative Enemy: Two – The Landowners

By Eduard Bernstein

Britain’s landowners have a lot to thank Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain for. These two men, both Prime Ministers in the 1930s, enacted the disastrous policy of appeasement of fascism, so allowing a man who came to power in a country with no airforce, a tiny navy and a minuscule army to, in less than a decade, dominate Europe, master, if briefly, the Atlantic and flatten Rotterdam, Coventry and Stalingrad from the air. Way to go Tory boys!

The man, of course, was Adolf Hitler and it was the spectre of Britain cut off from external food supplies, as we so nearly were in 1941 and 1942, that made it acceptable to pay landowners loads of money for, well, owning land (the idea was that they would use that land to grow food, but that has generally been optional, not compulsory).

Such state subsidies, latterly codified in the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (which gives us dearer food as well as starving much of the developing world) deal with what has been a constant fact of civilisation – indeed the very genesis of civilisation – as human ingenuity increases, the price of food falls.

This rule of history – it is pretty much an iron one – is bad news for people who seek to avoid work by owning things: which is generally what being rich is all about. If you used to be rich because you owned 100 acres and now it turns out mechanisation means farms of 500 acres can knocked you into a cocked hat on price (and quality) it is state subsidy or bust time.

Democracy is a bit of a problem too – all those cities filling up with much more productive waged workers who don’t buy into your cult of the soil and find that they can buy better and cheaper food from abroad can be difficult to hold in check.

Hence the eternal thanks to Stan and Nev and good old Herr Hitler.

Today, of course, the idea that we’d have to battle a foreign foe for control of the Atlantic in the event of world war is somewhat ridiculous. A truly global war would be over quicker than you can say “two megatonne airbust”. So landowners have to find other ways to get workers to pay for them to continue to enjoy the quiet life.

First up is the idea that there is something fundamentally authentic about country life that those of us who dwell in cities should aspire to or, if it is all going wrong, don’t understand. Most people who live in the country actually are wage labourers like the rest of us. Only a tiny minority farm the land as owners. Yet we are supposed to set all aspects of policy – from food, to housing and planning, in their interests.

The rural conservatives are right though – traditional farming is dying out. Just like traditional weaving did or, for that matter, traditional coal mining. It doesn’t make economic sense and so it is going.

At this point we can just about here the screams of the outraged “you don’t know how hard farmers work” mob. Well, actually, do they work any harder than the coal miners the Tories all told us had to go? I doubt it.

Of course not all farmers are rich – though have you ever met a poor one? No, me neither. And hill farmers in particular can struggle to make a living, as do, say contract cleaners. But here’s the rub: the demand for cleaners isn’t showing any sign of going away, but one thing is sure, we have far too many hill farmers. Their life is hard partly because we insist on propping them up while they are engaged in growing something (sheep) where supply fundamentally outstrips demand.

And finally, the anti-European loons will now be telling us that it is all Europe’s fault (or the EUSSR as even people as sensible – irony is so hard to do in writing – as John Redwood now call it: you won’t be laughing when we show you in the Brussels GuLag mate). Of course, it was Europe’s right who demanded the CAP and who now defend it most strenuously. And if the Tories hate the CAP so much why do their MEPs never waste an opportunity to demand more subsidies for farmers, to defend the most indefensible aspects of the policy (such as the sugar regime) and even such born again Europhobes as William Hague begin their parliamentary career by demanding ever more taxpayers money to prop up their farmers?