There’s a moment every morning on a farm, usually somewhere around five o’clock, in the dark, in the cold, often in the rain, when the farmer has no choice to wake up. Someone has to feed the pigs, milk the cows or get on with harvest. That’s the gap between the people who make policy and the people who make food.
This week, that gap got wider.
The Green Party has selected Sarah Wakefield as their candidate for the Makerfield by-election. Wakefield runs a charity called Eating Better. That charity has been running workshops on “decolonial decision-making” in British farming.
It has shared reports listing perfectionism and a sense of urgency as characteristics of “white supremacy culture.” It has held sessions where participants celebrated what one organiser called “a joyful day filled with storytelling, decolonial practices and participatory action.”
Within living memory, this country had rationing. People alive today remember what it means when the food system fails. We have seen, in our own lifetimes, what supply chain shocks do, empty shelves, panic buying and vulnerable people going without.
Any conversation about farming that doesn’t start with food security is national security is not a serious conversation. Telling the people who actually grow our food that their industry needs to be “decolonised”, that perfectionism and a sense of urgency are symptoms of white supremacy, is just offensive.
Those conversations matter enormously right now. Farmers are facing an inheritance tax raid they were never warned was coming, forcing families to sell land that has been in their names for generations. Bovine TB is still destroying cattle herds and the testing system remains a disgrace. Mental health crisis in the farming community is at record levels. Farmers drove their tractors to Westminster last winter not out of protest theatre, but out of desperation, not only for their own farms but the countries rural heritage.
Gareth Wyn Jones, a Welsh farmer responding to this story, put it better than any politician “I think they need to grow up a little bit and start to have more proper, positive conversations with the agricultural industry. Not keep pointing the finger at us.”
British farming doesn’t need guilt, it needs policies that support productive and profitable farms.
A country that cannot feed itself is a country that is vulnerable, to world events, to price volatility, to the kind of shocks we have already lived through and will face again. Every farm that closes, every farmer who walks away, makes this nation weaker.
Farmers don’t need a lecture from a Manchester City councillor about the history of their own fields. They need policies that back British food production.
This kind of culture war posturing tells you everything about how out of touch the Green Party is with the people who actually feed this country.
