I read this morning, in Guy Watson’s musings on the card that comes with my Riverford Vegetables box, of his grave disquiet about the plight of farmers not only in this country but elsewhere. They have become squeezed between the power of the big corporations which no one seems able to challenge successfully and the costs of fuel and other inputs which they need to grow food. The big corporations include both retailers who continually revise downwards the payments they negotiate with farmers for the food we eat and the fossil fuel giants whose diesel is a necessity for farming machinery. Both are making profits while the farmers are making a loss. As Guy points out, farmers have cut their costs to the bone, sent their partners out to work in other industries, and done without employees, working themselves into the ground as a result. Increasingly, the only way of making a living from farming is to become part of an agribusiness, dedicated to profit at the expense of everything that has
Every day we hear of the so-called ‘migrant crisis’, with many hundreds of hopeful men, women and children, most of them asylum-seekers, braving the seas to travel here in small boats. In recent days they have benefited from the exceptionally benign November weather, but at other times they have courted death and disaster, and no one knows how many have drowned on the way. The welcome they receive if they make it is shoddy and shameful and entirely down to wilful lack of thought by the Home Office under Suella Braverman. One irony here is that not only Braverman, who is a member of an East African Asian family welcomed by this country in the 1960s, but also other senior ministers such as Pritti Patel and Sunak himself were lucky enough to be born here because their parents came when immigration rules were different. This should, one would think, make them more aware of what attracts people to the UK, even in the face of the overwhelmingly hostile attitude taken up by our government.