Britain’s eventual exit from the European Union will be disorderly and akin to getting kicked out of the pub at closing time according to environmental activist George Monbiot.
Speaking at the Oxford Farming Conference Mr Monbiot said: “it’ll be like getting a barman’s boot in the backside, finding yourself face down in the street and wondering what just happened.”
He insisted that the public would not tolerate the current £3billion of farm subsidy being “shovelled into pockets” after the UK leaves the EU. Instead he proposed three public funding streams for farming.
The first was a rural hardship fund, with money paid on the basis of need, not occupation. He said farmers would be likely to be the main, but not exclusive, recipients of that money.
“True, there are some poor farmers but there are people in countryside who are even poorer. An argument for a specific fund for farmers is exactly the same as for plumbers or solicitors,” he said.
The second fund would be for the provision of public goods such as environmental protection, restoration, protection of flooding or introducing children to nature.
“I would be happy if landowners or tenants lived off that,” he said.
The third stream would be a transitional fund to counter some of what he described as the ‘perverse’ effects of the current CAP. New entrants of any age could be beneficiaries of such a fund.
Mr Monbiot insisted that apart from these provisions there was no fair argument for the continuation of public money to agriculture. However he said if farmers were to rely on a market-based system for their income, it had to be a fair market.
He called on the Government to intervene in the relationship between supermarkets and suppliers to ensure farmers don’t get ‘steamrollered’ by supermarkets when they are exposed to the real market
He added: “Challenging the powers of the supermarkets could mean breaking them up to introduce retail competition in places where there isn’t any or applying antitrust measures which used to be popular 30,40 or 50 years ago but have subsequently disappeared because of lobbying. We’ve got to bring them back to make sure supermarkets can’t have power over producers.”
