Tag: Agriculture

The role of British Farmers has been neglected at our peril. Sadly, the politicians won’t see it until it’s too late, so it’s the Farmers who will have to begin the localised food supply chain revolution instead

Farmers are by nature, the most creative and entrepreneurial managers, engineers and technical workers that I know. They are, or rather they become these multitalented vocational giants by living lives that involve operational management, frequently calling them into action at any time, 24hrs a day, 365 days a year – pretty much from the day that they are born.

Farmers are, in effect, the complete antithesis of our Members of Parliament and the political class. And it’s because of the lack of understanding and respect for what British Farmers do, that the politicians we have – whether in Government or not, have allowed British Agriculture and all of the industries allied to and feeding into it, to reach the state that they are now in.

The problems that British Farmers face remain closely aligned to what their European counterparts are experiencing.

Indeed, whilst many from what in 2016 was the Remain camp are still pushing the narrative that leaving the EU and the whole Brexit vote was a gargantuan mistake, those same people are strangely silent when it comes to comment or discussion on what Farmers within in the EU Member nations are facing right now.

Across Europe, unelected bureaucrats and out of touch politicians are pushing an agenda which will see Nation States close down some of the very best food production in the world. All at a time when supply chains are already collapsing, there are growing food shortages and in no time at all it will not just be hungry people who are out of sight and out of mind that could be the ones who are about to starve or go without.

What underscores the futility and the madness of this perverse strategy, pursued by people who have never been at the hard end of an operational business in their life, is the reality that their grand plan mirrors the ridiculous decisions made by the political classes across Europe not only to shelve and mothball, but to destroy fossil fuel burning energy plants and sources. All coming under the ridiculous assumption that buying in supplies and services from elsewhere from across the World is not only safe, but can be sold to the public as being green and therefore alright.

Yes, you did read that correctly. The leading classes of Europe and the UK too, are and have for some time quite literally been shutting down, wilfully neglecting and even deliberately destroying our own national systems of production.

The politicians we have elected to look after our best interests have been making us all vulnerable to whoever they then do some kind of deal to buy replacement supplies and services from.

All of this is so that Politicians can pay lip service to fulfilling an impossibly idealistic promise of achieving Net Zero – or some other departure from reality based narrative they are pushing that isn’t just economic with the truth, but is an outright lie.

Why is the lie so important? The lie that the politicians tell is so important, because it’s just another lie to cover up the impact of another very big and very damaging lie about the benefits of globalisation and commercialisation – which is what the EU was always really about.

The irony should be lost on none of us that Globalisation and greed-based Commercialism are the real and genuine cause of all of the climate and environmental problems that we do genuinely have.

Equally, we should be under no illusion that the climate and environmental problems that we do genuinely have would go into free fall, in the direction of positive change, the moment that we stepped back from the money is god and a profit led existence, and allowed on-shoring, relocalisation and the protectionism that is now essential to the UKs future to be restored.

Whilst it will never be said about the European Union, even by many of the Brexiteers who never really understood this part of the EU Membership travesty themselves, the EU and everything about it has just been one disastrous exercise in globalisation and commercialisation.

The Common Market and everything that followed as part of the EU Project evolution was a self-serving spin off of the Globalisation myth, repackaged with the lie that with the overarching politicisation and centralisation of the European sub version, the issues that befall the removal of international barriers and the many risks it brings on a Global level, would never be our own.

As many of us can already see with just the Energy Crisis alone, this foolishness – however well intended, doesn’t work when so many differences of opinion, cultures and different ways of being are involved.

We can all see what has happened as a result of Western Governments responding as they have to the war in Ukraine, when the same politicians had destroyed our own self sufficiencies in order to ‘open up the doors’.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the impact of all the very poor decision making that got into full swing long before Brexit, Covid and Ukraine were ever in the frame.

Sadly, the system collapse that so many within the elites, the establishment and our own government are doing so much to hide, is already well underway.

It’s just the case that we are not all going over the cliff at the same moment in time. That’s why not all of us can see it. YET.

However, the fall of an entire industry that will affect all of us – our Farming Industry – is most definitely already underway. And we fail to realise, accept and understand this at our peril.

Yes, food is on the supermarket shelves. We can still get just about everything we could possibly want. So you are probably asking the question, ‘Why should we be worried about Farmers and British Agriculture now?

Sadly, we will not believe that life can be any different to what it is now, until it already is.

If you need an example that makes sense of this, cast your mind back to the beginning of 2020 when the first lockdown began and then life changed for us all in an instant.

We may have forgotten Social Distancing and Lockdowns for now. But many of the direct consequences of disastrously poor decision making on the part of our politicians is only just beginning to materialise now, nearly three years on.

Amongst all of the issues which are currently popular, the ability of the UK to feed itself is strangely absent from that list. Yet the UK Food supply is now at massive risk of collapse – That’s the supply of the food that we need to meet our basic needs and not the ridiculous variety of imported and mass processed items and ingredients that we have become used to.

Our Basic food supply is at risk for a number of reasons. These include the centralisation and globalisation of food supply chains which are going to collapse; the way that British Agriculture has been placed at the mercy of innumerable agents, resellers, speculators, traders and middle men who take massive profits whilst adding no value and push farm prices down, whilst pushing retail prices up; and decades of reconditioning under the auspices of EU membership that has led British Farmers to rely on subsidies that have taken away the incentive and freedom to compete.

There are many more.

The situation regarding our food supply is much more complicated and serious than it is possible to do real justice here.

The real tragedy and threat to us all, is that because our Politicians created or led the implementation of the market structures that are currently at work – even though they did so in no small part on behalf of the EU – everyone, and most importantly our Farmers, are expecting our politicians to ensure that every issue created by Brexit, along with the collapse of global supply chains and the fallout of other events such as the War in Ukraine, will be dealt with – as it is perfectly reasonable and logical for us to be able to expect.

They have not. They are not. They will not be addressed by the politicians we have.

I have been writing at length about the changes, challenges and difficulties we face. But this isn’t just the interpretation of one former politician and businessman sharing the reasoning of their own concerns. A former head of MI5 has warned about the issue of food security, as well as the National Farmers Union itself have been sounding the alarm.

The real problem that even these very credible sources cannot counter, is that our politicians are so out of touch and prioritise whatever they believe to be in their best interests.

It is not until you really begin to understand just how out of touch with reality our politicians actually are, that you can then start to consider and appreciate that the British People are heading for an extraordinary amount of pain, that would have been both unnecessary and avoidable IF we had politicians that fulfilled their responsibilities as they always should do.

Getting people and especially Farmers to realise and understand that the solutions will not come from this government or any new government that is formed from the political parties or groups that are known to us and that we have on offer to us today is challenging indeed. Especially as it means that the solutions we now need, through restructuring, onshoring and relocalising supply chains to a what we would recognise as being conversant with a much more traditional form, MUST be led with British Farmers and all of the related industries right out in front. Just as the political change that we all so desperately need must also come from the grassroots up.

I began writing this blog by making reference to the ingenuity and industriousness of our Farmers. This has already been well illustrated by the many ways that members of the Farming Community have already diversified their businesses, to become manufacturers, growers, producers and retailers of a very different kind, taking back control and managing every step of the process from farm to fork themselves, or working collaboratively on a very small localised scale, where it can quite literally be said that many hands make light work.

Whilst our Politicians will not accept this probably until it is too late to avert further harm, UK self sufficiency in food production, as well as the majority of the key things or basics that we are going to need, is not only now strategically key to our future. This is how world events and the UKs circumstances will soon dictate that they MUST be.

We cannot wait for the politicians to change their minds, or it wont just be the cost of living crisis, but shortages of basic foods that make British People hungry too.

Our existing politicians will always exhibit loyalty to the very system that has broken the back of British Farming for no other reasons than greed, profit and control. The existing Public Policies on Farming, Fisheries and Food have certainly never been for the purposes of benefiting UK Industries or British consumers – no matter the lies and the lies to cover up those lies that we have been continually told.

Please can we all wake up before its too late and there is nothing left to work with. We need a revolution in farming and we need it to happen now.

It will not come from the top and must run from the grassroots up. Farmers must be at the middle of local food supply – the way it should always have been.

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The terminal weakness of a greed-based supply chain has always been present, hiding in plain sight

An entire generation of business and industry managers have been trained and qualified on systems that are all about reducing costs.

Their ‘qualifications’ play up to the belief that very elaborate supply chains that take or harvest raw materials to be refined, and then to be made in to small parts, and then to be made into bigger parts, and then those parts to be made into perhaps cars or machines, and then those cars or machines appear at a dealership where we buy them – with all of the transportation, sorting and storage in between – going back and forth around the world – can be maintained ‘just in time’ and with the minimum of anything being stockpiled ‘on a shelf’ at any location along that supply line.

The system that has developed around this idea has not only affected the apparently low price of the products we buy at the end of the chain. It has also relied on pushing every part of every possible chain involved to the limit where minimising the cost of raw materials and production of any kind to the absolute minimum is concerned.

Profit has been the only driver. But even the drive for profit against the steps that are necessary in any supply chain have been further complicated and exploited by the reality that people and interests that are completely unnecessary to each supply chain have become involved.

So-called ‘agents’ step in to the middle of supply chains and buy goods and then sell them on at a profit – sometimes even years before they have even been grown or produced, making a profit and adding to the end costs – without adding any value to the end product. This often happens many times.

People or self-serving interests could not keep taking from and exploiting others in the way that this Globalised System has allowed them to do so without the cost to others becoming to high. In financial terms, that point has now been reached.

But the real price hasn’t just been the fact that the poorest and most vulnerable are no longer able to afford to live.

Neither is it the reality that poverty and hunger is an issue that more and more of us are about to face.

The real cost is that all of the ways of living and the localised systems that meant we always had access to the things that we genuinely need to survive each day have been removed or have been replaced, and this monstrosity of a system that works for no god other than profit, has been choking us all without us even realising, as it has aggressively been put in its place.

Today, we have literally reached a point where our farmers are not being paid what it costs them to produce foods at the fist stage of a supply chain. They are now choosing to stop producing, because it costs them too much to do so. Right at the very moment when worldwide food shortages are coming into view.

Today, we are perhaps weeks or months away from the point when trouble for us all will really begin.

Surviving The Great Reset: Farmers are not ready for the change, so we must be until they are

The current system is not set up to get all the foods we actually need grown and prepared for us locally. So when the acute stages of The Great Reset happen and the big profit-focused supply chains have irreparably broken down, the reality is that there will be a period of time when this ‘old systme’ stops providing for us, and when the new (or rather renewed) local supply chain system has been put in place.

Yes, there are some really good examples of Farmers here in the UK and elsewhere too, who are offering us all their dairy products, meats, produce and even beer that has come from crops and animals grown and prepared on the farm.

If you’ve tried what they produce, you will already know that its fantastically good. But right now its also very expensive – because of how the big corporate interests have such a ridiculous level of control.

If our politicians were awake enough and forward thinking enough to recognise what lies ahead – even though they bear much of the responsibility for it happening themselves, they would be doing everything they could to support our Farmers – who by their very nature are great innovators – to turn production on its head and grow and produce everything locally, either on their own, or as part of small and localised cooperatives that make practical sense with how different animals are taken care of and how different produce and crops are grown.

Politicians will not do that today, because like the big interests that profit from it, they have too much invested in everything continuing as it appears to be at the moment, and for it continuing to be run and to make money or to continue to benefit them in the same way.

We will have no option but to work with and support our local farmers to reequip and redesign their operations and business models when the time comes that we need them. This may even mean some of us literally getting out there and helping on the land. Otherwise the future beyond The Great Reset will be one where our lives revolve around little more than the question of what we will next have to eat.

The hard message to take in and consider here, is that without the changes in policy and the contingency planning that our out-of-touch politicians should today be taking care of, there is a period of time – that will hopefully be short – when in respect of at least some foods, but potentially a lot more and possibly everything that we need, we may have to go without.

We cannot rely on our politicians to do the right thing. We cannot rely on Politicians to keep everyone fed. We cannot rely on Politicians to keep the things that are vital to our life working, when things will no longer work, and the only solution Politicians have is to ask how much it will cost.

We have to Prepare, Produce and make Provision.

It’s time to start growing your own food.

Surviving The Great Reset: A helpful lesson from our Farmers on Preparing, Producing & Making Provision

If you really want to understand how the basics of providing for life work, look no further than the cycles of activity that take place on one of those farms that too many of us overlook for providing our milk:

  • The grass that grows in the early spring is cut in mid-late spring and early summer. The earlier cuts are turned into silage (fermented grass which in a process not unlike brewing, means that nutrients for the cows are increased). The later ones into hay (dried grass which you often see as very green looking bales).
  • Silage and Hay are stored over the summer and early autumn, whilst the cows go out and enjoy all of their fields, whilst grass continues to grow.
  • When the autumn and winter comes and the grass has stopped growing and the ground has become too muddy for the cows and their hooves, they move inside and under shelter, where they are fed with either their Hay or Silage, and sleep on beds made from the straw of cereal crops, so that they are all dry and warm.
  • The Farmer will have planned and made enough Silage and Hay the previous spring and summer, to make sure that the cows have more than enough to eat for the whole time that they have to stay inside.
  • Throughout this period, the herd of cows will be providing milk perhaps twice or even three times a day – that’s during spring, summer, autumn and winter, so that milk, cheese, yoghurt and anything else that is made with dairy products or ingredients of some kind can come and will continue to come your way.
  • The whole process is a cycle that goes round and round. It never stops or finishes, if the cows and we want to continue to eat.

The Farmers prepare, produce and make provision. That way, their cows are always fed, can always produce their milk, so that we can all be fed and not go hungry too.

Full UK Self Sufficiency must now be the aim

Of all the myths created by those with an interest in building and maintaining an alternative narrative, the one that our changing world now requires us to completely rethink is our dependency upon any essential products or foods from anywhere abroad.

The UK possess the basic resources and environment necessary to support and provide for all of our basic needs. We require very little and can make do without minimal ongoing input from supply chains that are not localised or our own – if that is, we really even need it at all.

Basic Clothing & Footwear

Perhaps one of the most challenging areas covering basic needs provision will be that of the supply of affordable shoes and clothing.

If there is one area of industry that has been outsourced to other Countries more than any other, it will surely be the production of clothes and shoes.

Whilst many today look scornfully on shops such as Sports Direct, the reality is that retailers of this type are today providing goods at a price that keep people on low incomes clothed.

The irony is that whilst cheap and cheerful, the price reflects the quality of the materials and the manufacturing. It is not uncommon for such items to require regular replacement and over time, for the customer to have paid out much more on multiple purchases of the same items at a lower cost, than it would have done over the same period IF they had been able to afford a better-quality version of the same thing.

Whilst cotton will always be imported to the UK as a raw material, wool and other materials are not. There will be a need to redevelop the British Textiles industry with a primary focus on the materials that we have readily available from our own production, or which can be supplied without significant reliance on international supply chains from our traditional trading partners.

Rationing: A way of sharing the basics fairly, so there is enough for all

The days of unnecessary food production and manufacturing, prioritised only on the basis of repeat financial turnover and profit-making are done – even if that doesn’t appear to be the case right now.

As we experienced being the case in the early days and weeks after the first Covid Lockdown was called in March 2020, foods and goods such as flour, some vegetables, some fruits and toilet rolls are likely to be in short supply. The reality is that they will be the first of a growing and ultimately extensive list.

The rationing that will quickly become necessity, will also be a sign of things to come. Our industries, production and manufacturing will have to be redeveloped and reestablished to support UK self sufficiency in its most comprehensive and practical form.

Yes, rationing sounds horrible to anyone who has never been without or has never known what it is like to not be able to eat a meal, because the food that they need is something that they cannot afford.

Yet there are real people – possibly people that you or I pass in the street each and every day, who are already living what to you might see your own worst nightmare AND they are forced by the way that the system = works now to make the best of it. They literally have no choice but to accept it and do whatever the world requires of them to at least try and get by.

The silver lining of the situation that we all face, where the foods, goods and services that are essential to daily life will be rationed at least temporarily for all of us, is that it will provide us all with a real-life understanding of what we and therefore everyone needs as a basic standard in order to ‘just get by’.

This level, or the accumulation of the different basic foods, essential goods and services that an adult needs to be able to obtain in order to survive and maintain their exitance, is the benchmark level to which a basic full time or weekly wage should thereafter correspond and then be maintained, once the Great Correction is complete.

The True Value of everything we buy or pay for

In the future, prices will reflect what they really cost to produce and get to you, with only an appropriate layer of profit added at the minimum number of stages of the supply chain that are necessary for any essential goods or service provision to reach you.

For instance, you buy a loaf of bread from the baker. The baker buys the flour from the miller. The miller buys the wheat from the farmer. That’s three necessary points in the supply chain that gets you a loaf of bread.

What we don’t then need is a broker buying the wheat from the farmer that he hasn’t even grown yet, and then selling it on to a grain merchant when it has actually been produced, with both of these two stages themselves adding unnecessary work and additional profit for themselves, all adding to the end cost for you.

This example is a very simplified view – and deliberately so.

Try to visualise just how many different interests have and are able to become involved with the process or supply chain providing goods and services, where global and even UK-wide supply chains are at work.

The prices of everything have been massively overinflated without any additional value being added to the end product.

This is one of the key reasons why we will return to supply chains that are as local as it is possible for them to be, and a system where only recognisable players – who are adding value to the end product – are actually involved.

UK self-sufficiency and localisation of food supply chains from British Farms should now be the Government priority. Not vanity-led trade deals that undermine them

Globalisation as we knew it before the age of Lockdowns is over. We may not feel it, understand it or in most cases even see it. But the World has been changed by the chain reaction that was set in motion by the COVID Pandemic.

Daylight is now beginning to shine upon all the hidden, self-serving and myopic powers that influence our way of life. They are coming together in a concert of chaos with COVID conducting the orchestra – right at the fore.

It may sound dramatic. But the subjectivity and focus we have on everything beyond our own lives and the bubbles we unwittingly live in make it easy for us to ignore how things really are at the objective level. We are and have been living through significant National and World events that have consequences neither we, but even more importantly our politicians, can or now will avoid.

Loss of the realism that a genuine overview provides leaves us out of touch with the reality of what is happening. We take for granted that daily life will always go on as it has and that everything continues in the same way.

Yet the assumption that an encyclopaedic range of foods and products will always meet us when we walk through the supermarket doors or click online is a storybook waiting for a bad ending. And that ending is now almost certain to emerge.

Whilst the Government, media and the establishment they serve tell us that everything will return to the pre-COVID ‘normal’, concocted narratives cannot change nor head off the impact and consequences of the decisions they made, the money they created then spent, and the stories they have told to control people during a pandemic.  

The change is already underway. We can already see it in the questions over home working and many revaluating where they wish to live. Change will touch everything, and this will include even the most basic parts of life, including the clothes we wear and the food that we eat.

We simply don’t need all the things that we buy, eat or drink, and many of us already know and understand this. Whilst it may sound moralistic to say so, it is certainly no coincidence that as a population we are becoming so unhealthy when we are happy sleepwalking through life in the way that we do.

The good, wholesome, locally and ethically produced foods that we genuinely need to live and feed ourselves would not be expensive if we prioritised production using the most localised supply chains possible. It could mean the ingredients of the meals we eat have not travelled outside of our own County boundaries or been carried much further on their journey from farm to fork.

Some may snort at the mere suggestion of returning to a world where butchers, bakers and every kind of traditional village shop or business sell you the produce and goods that have come to them for preparation from local farms and producers.

But this is the way that the world we know will go if it is again to begin making any kind of sense, and we do not need the Government or ambitious Ministers attempting to open up trade flow to Countries that will undercut our own farmers and producers. Indeed, the Countries that Trade Ministers are now talking to should be actively and demonstratively encouraged to develop their own enhanced forms of productivity as we all work towards the level of national and localised self-sufficiency that the post-COVID World and the collapse of global Supply chains will soon demand.

In the simplest terms, the rise and threat of what has been called the ‘Indian variant’ of COVID demonstrates some of the starkest lessons of how this virus works. The ZERO COVID solution that this Government has tied itself to will at some point have to be flipped to become one that we learn to live with it and treat it the same as we do the Flu.

Whether we continue going forward under the premise that COVID control is the only priority or change and accept that there are other ways to live, we can no longer allow or encourage the mass movement of people or encourage unnecessary international supply chains just for the sake of making profit in any way.

Borders will literally have to become borders once again. No matter how much we might we deserve that foreign holiday, we are no longer living in a world where there will continue to be one rule for ‘wealthy’ countries and another for all those that the ignorant and greedy thumb their noses at and call poor.

Viruses and the impacts of ill-considered human behaviour do not recognise boundaries. They have consequences for us all.

For better or worse, COVID is a virus that is here to stay. Global eradication is not possible with the political mindset that the world currently has, and we will soon have no option but to learn and act upon the realities that the spread of a respiratory disease through an interconnected version of the World presents.

Meanwhile, the decision making and behaviours of politicians, banks ad big business as they have struggled to maintain control during the Covid Pandemic has led them to supercharge the growth of the many problems that greed and profiteering have created.

Going local, real localism and putting our communities at the forefront of everything we build our lives around will now become key to addressing the change that events will create and to become happy and content in ways that we have culturally long since forgot.

Farmers, producers and those who run and maintain very local services and cottage industry businesses are going to be key. Allowing any foreign country to undercut local production of any kind – no matter our historic ties – will quickly become one of the greatest acts of economic self-harm in the post-COVID world.

This is not about having a downer on Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the USA or any Country with which we might have once found it desirable to extend trade with. All Countries across the World are going to have to face up to the realities of the step away from globalisation to closed borders and what this really means for prioritising local production too.

Self-sufficiency for food and essential goods must become both a National and Government priority for the UK. Within this, we must look to promote and encourage everyone to shop and focus what they do and the lives they live locally in pretty much the complete opposite way that globalisation and the greed that underpins it has done.

Government must guide and support the development of truly local cooperatives. Legislators must embrace and utilise the freedom we have following our unshackling from the EU to legislate in ways that mean it is both practical and cost effective for every service that businesses require to produce and manufacture locally will not only exist but will thrive in such ways that lead to local products and services being made available to everyone at prices even the poorest in society can afford.

Local Enterprise Partnerships or alternative bodies like them should be used to join up the dots and encourage this growth locally.

Instead of encouraging agriculture and food production to become ever more focused on ‘cost effective’ production that means they increasingly only become viable with the economies of scale and size, our legislators must look at regulating and restricting all of the malign influences that take money out of the supply chain, thereby increasing end-user cost. They are currently adding no value, as part of an equation that increasingly leaves heathy food being a luxury that only the financially wealthy can afford.

Farm shops, farmers markets and the systems of local production that can and must feed into them must be the direction of travel. We must reject the reliance upon retail giants and a system where shareholders and financial speculators make ridiculous sums of money after the companies they ‘own’ can appear to move goods around the planet more cheaply than our own producers can make them. The practice where supermarket buyers crush any farmers ability to both supply them and remain profitable must come to its end.

British Farmers are some of the most innovative and entrepreneurial members of society that we have. There is little doubt that if we both embrace and support the role that they can and will willingly then take within a new and diversified platform for UK food growing and production, the true value to us all of the wider rural and agricultural sector and the community that underpins it will come into its own and be good for us all.

Support local shops, farmers and suppliers today so they are there for you when other options no longer exist

If things about this new life we are living make you feel uneasy, you have good reason to be concerned.

Beneath the veneer of slogans, the false security given by social distancing and the Government’s big cash handout given with a manufactured smile that is meant to tell us it’ll all be alright, trouble is brewing on an unprecedented scale not just across the UK, but the whole World throughout.

Policies like the Job Retention Scheme are creating a false perception of the condition the UK’s economy and businesses are in.

There is a genuine belief that things will just go back to how they were up until the 23rd of March, as if the Prime Minister has a great big UK On/Off switch.

Regrettably, this picture has been echoed by political ineptitude across the World and if tackling the Coronavirus Pandemic the way they have chosen to really was the war that politicians like Boris would like it pictured to be, in hindsight, the Lockdown and all the Social Distancing measures will become known as the phoney bit.

What is only clear to very few today, is there has been no comparable event in history that gives anyone an idea of how any of this can now actually work and anything remain the same.

The Lockdown has set off a chain reaction that will not only break the back of many small businesses and destroy the jobs that they provide, it is also setting off asymmetrical reactions and consequences in supply chains and big businesses not only in the UK but right across the World.

Because we have for so long taken for granted that we can drive to Sainsbury’s, Tesco or Morrisons and that our milk, eggs and sausages will have simply materialised on the shelves along with petrol at the garage to fill our cars, we have forgotten to look into the processes that get them there and just how complicated the supply chains are that make it look and feel like only simplicity is involved.

Greed on an unimaginable scale has meant big is best and global is even better. We don’t question the fragility of a system that had already become so dangerously convoluted before the crisis, simply because everything in these shops appears to be so cheap.

In the coming weeks and months, the appearance of everything going on as normal is going to crash spectacularly to the floor. The real damage that the Lockdown has created is likely to mean that the experience we had with there being no toilet rolls on the shelves at the end of March will expand to include many other ‘essential items’. Yet this time the shortage will be very real because the manufacturers and suppliers that the Supermarkets buy from can’t get the things they need for production, or they themselves will no longer exist.

Nothing is too big to fail, as many of the big companies whose only focus has been on profit are about to find out.

So if you want to be sure that you can put food on the table and get access to supplies and services that you genuinely need when things begin to get really hard as they soon will, buy whatever you need from your local shops, farms and suppliers of every kind today so that they are there and able to serve you with the goods and services you need at a price you can still afford when you have neither the option nor the choice.

Our Politicians sold out our Farming and Fishing Communities to appease other EU Members when we joined. It would be as contradictory as it would be treacherous for them to do so again when the British People Voted to Leave

 

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I’m proud to be British. To be part of the whole Community which populates the whole of this, our UK. To know that by striving to put what is in our best interests first, will allow us to contribute bigger, better and more considerate things to the World all around.

Yet I know that as businesses and as individuals we all have our part to play. That we are as a Nation, the sum of all our different parts. That if we purposefully neglect any type of business, industry, individual or group of people, we will disadvantage ourselves not in part or as a fraction, but collectively, together and in sum total as a whole.

It is shameful that our Politicians have reached a place where they do not see any need to do the same, and that they put self-interest before that of the people who directly elected them.

They have outsourced the responsibility with which they have been entrusted, instead looking upon their position of influence as something for their own use which they effectively own.

Two of the Communities that have rightly expected to have a different experience as a positive consequence of Brexit are those in and around Farming and Fishing.

Because British Agriculture and Fishing and the control of both our related resources and their markets were so prized by the Europeans – and particularly the French who as now were one of the most influential and key beneficiaries of the European Project – they were both key targets for industrial subjugation by the Michel Barniers and Guy Verhofstadts of the day.

As with Theresa May today, her predecessors of the time were so hell-bent upon winning what they perceived as being a beneficial relationship with the EU, that they were not only prepared to, but actively sold out and compromised these two World renowned and identifiably British Industries purely for what they wrongly told us would be an overall gain.

Joining the Common Market and becoming enslaved by the evolution and thereafter legitimised assimilation of everything which was once under our own control, through undemocratic rule making, implementation and administrative control creep of the European Project has left both UK Agriculture and UK Fishing as mere shadows of what they would otherwise now have been.

There was no gain for Farming and Fishing.

UK Farming and Fishing have only experienced a net loss.

Subsidies have removed competitiveness from smaller scale specialist farming and created a dependent culture through the industry whilst making it near impossible to build a genuinely profitable business either without the scales of economy or without diversifying businesses into a range of areas which either have to be uniquely niche or have the ability to buck the online retail trends.

The travesty we have witnessed where fields stand idle because it is more cost effective for farmers to do nothing with them, and huge swaths of land have become more useful to owners for leisure rather than production has hurt our farmers, but the Country too. And it is clearly no accident that as a result of the requirements of EU Membership, we could not be further away from self-sufficiently as a Nation, if national emergency were to require that of the UK too.

Our Fishing rights were always prized by all the European Countries who have their own Fleets too and the EU must have thought all of it’s Christmases had arrived all at once, the day that an out of touch politician ceded those Rights and with them access to all of our Fishing, leaving greed on the part of Foreign Powers to lead to overfishing and abuse of our Fishing Stocks, without us having any ability to influence or bring a halt to this very unwelcome tide.

Many of our trawlers were simply scrapped to adhere to the EU’s implementation of quotas, where the idea of balance between 28 nations is to share out access to resources and markets. We are one, they are twenty seven. When we have great things which we give away to be shared, the point of balance move not towards the one and to a point which is not difficult to picture. Is this fair? You decide.

Within both industries and despite the buy-offs from The EU, which have ironically only ever been our own money, repackaged and sold as a form of benevolence which would otherwise be denied, Farming and Fishing communities up and down the United Kingdom votes Leave and instructed Politicuans to bring back their futures, like all of ours, to the determination of our own democratically elected politicians. They rejected The EU, it’s autocracy and inherent self-interest and said we have a much better future ahead.

Yet as Remsiners have taken ever step possible and used every opportunity possible to overturn the democratic will of the people and that which our farming and fishing communities displayed, they have continued to overlook and ignore the realities of the power and potential benefits that all of our businesses, industries, people and communities hold.

These lacklustre politicians want to sell us out yet again, completely oblivious to the many great worlds we have throughout the UK, dismissing the validity of anything they do not understand and attempting to create an even closer union with the EU whilst telling us they are delivering the will of the people with the assumption that what they say will be taken as being the truth, whilst the truth itself can from the safety of London always be cleverly denied.

Feeding the UK is a vital part of our future. We must prioritise UK Agriculture and Fishing once again and dismiss these destructive EU systems which have never benefitted any of us in the UK in any meaningful way. We know they aren’t good for us because we’ve had decades of them being tried.

Image thanks to the times.co.uk

Effect-focussed Government has failed us all. Can we really move forward with a plan of something better for all if we never address the causes of our problems?

Leaps in utility prices touch just about everyone’s lives either directly or indirectly. No less so because of the growing paradox which appears to be a guaranteed bottom line for shareholders, whilst customers continually carry the can for everything that any non-essential business would have no option but to absorb within what are today’s unalterable margins.

Public services such as Trains run under much the same guise, and the question really should be asked if the time has come when any provider of a key or essential service should remain able to have a free reign over charges and their levels of profit when the end user simply has no choice but to buy?

Similarly, margins drawn from the production and retail of essential basic items such as milk, bread, meats and vegetables must surely now be protected from City speculation and the stranglehold of the big retailers who are together endangering various food producing industries in what is little more than an obligation to sustain and build upon profits, laid down by the purely financial motives of their masters.

So what exactly is stopping the long needed change in direction which would embrace a true form of moral or rather responsible capitalism, which in its boldest form would serve to protect a basic and affordable living for all, whilst delivering an arguably much reduced cost for Government?

One of the key failings of many of today’s politicians is a fundamental lack of understanding, will and fortitude to deal with the deep rooted causes of the problems that we as a nation face; instead choosing to do little more than dalliance in dealing with the effects of bad or flawed decisions, then going on to repeat the very same mistakes when that latest remedy itself begins to demonstrate its flaws.

Be under no illusion, this process is not unique to any political genre or ideology. It is a deep seated and inherently progressive condition, made all the worse by a political party system which now serves only to propagate itself and those within it who effectively function to do the very same, placing electability before delivery.

Successive Governments, whether they have been Conservative, Labour or even Coalitions have done the very same things, albeit with a different wrapper. But with little more than a ‘fire and forget’ mentality, the consequences are plain to see and there for us all to share and experience in our everyday lives.

The commonalities within privatisation, right-to-buy, the evolution of the free market and even political parties themselves are that they were arguably all political creations with a great and beneficial purpose in mind for those who were the driving forces behind them.

However, like most great ideas in Government that come to be manifest, they have progressively moved beyond their point of balance or what some might choose to call good, and have gone in another direction entirely. One which has benefited the unscrupulous and cost those of us dearly who have the right to expect the protection of our everyday interests by those who we put in place to take that responsibility on our behalf to do so.

Acceptance that the evolution of policies can and will continue beyond their point of good is no enviable task. This is particularly so when many organisations, NGO’s and even Government Departments have been created simply to deliver upon questionable policies and their lucrative spin-offs. In many cases they arguably continue to exist for the sole purpose of existing.

Trades Unions, Health & Safety Legislation and European red-tape are all examples of well-intentioned principles which have gone way beyond their point of good. Even UK Taxation and Benefits no longer represent the equitable and fair approach that we should all be able to reasonably expect from a 21st Century Western Government and the implementation of truly fair systems such as Flat Tax are long since overdue.

Fear of driving the watershed of change needed in an age where we have laws for the sake of having laws; where blame is a national industry and where everyday people feel that Government of all levels has no understanding of the lives that they lead, is no longer excuse enough in itself to avoid it.

Painful as it will be, somebody will soon have to be big enough to take on big business, the City and the insidious money men who are continuously elevating the breadline, all in the name of profit.

Selfless politicians must set about the change of policy after policy which may well serve their political masters today, but remain lifetimes away from serving those for whose benefit they were apparently intended.

Effect-focussed Government has failed us all and not least the most vulnerable in society and shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted does little to help after the event.

Can we really move forward with a plan of something better for all if we never address the causes of our problems?