WITH regard to your excellent article (Malvern Gazette & Ledbury Reporter, December 8), the Government's rural White Paper published a fortnight ago seems to have met with a very mixed response in this area.
There are certainly some good measures in it; like the 50 per cent rate cut for village shops, pubs and garages; investment in health care centres and help for rural transport schemes. However, all this is just window dressing, as it does nothing to address the fundamental problem.
The countryside is about farming, and farming has been brought to the brink of extinction. Total farm incomes in the UK have fallen by 29 per cent this year alone. Since 1995, the average income reduction has amounted to 70 per cent and is now at its lowest level for 60 years. Imagine your own income, was reduced by this level. Could you manage?
However, our farm owners can always take advantage of these new proposals by "diversifying". Planning laws are to be reformed to allow prime agricultural land to be developed, so we can, presumably, look forward to more theme parks and golf courses.
To be fair, a British government can do practically nothing to help farmers, because it is no longer in their power to do so. Agricultural policy is now decided in Brussels, by unelected Eurocrats, just as in so many other areas of our daily lives. These laws are rubber stamped by the toothless European Parliament and passed down to the individual national governments to implement.
This week, more European Union subsidy cheques are dropping through farmhouse letter boxes. It is just as well, as it may save a few of our farms from complete insolvency. Our "Agriculture" Minister, Nick Brown, seems particularly pleased by this, as he claimed the other day that EU and national taxpayers' support for the farming industry was increasing and now stood at £3.8 billion a year.
Are we supposed to be pleased that our farmers can no longer make a living out of producing food for us, due to the EU's ruinous Common Agricultural Policy? Is it a good thing that they can only get by on hand outs from the EU? This is after all, our money anyway, since the UK gives away £31 million a day for the dubious "benefit" of belonging to the EU.
Once the EU is enlarged, and we have many more eastern European farmers to support, through the CAP, what are our farmers expected to do? Of course, they can diversify by concreting over their fields: then, they can dress up in ye oldie Tudor costumes, to work in theme parks, or to act as golf caddies, in the fields that they once farmed. This will enable them to earn enough to buy imported foreign food to eat.
This madness will only stop if we withdraw from the EU, and go back to running our own affairs, on the World stage, for our own benefit.
R G Spencer, Court Road, Malvern.
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