Jim Butler’s family has farmed the same fields around Bromham, north of Devizes, since the 1640s. These fields lie in the shadow of Roundway Down, where the Royalist Army won their greatest victory of the Civil War by pushing the Parliamentarian cavalry down the steep slope into ‘Bloody Ditch’, as it became known. (Actually Jim thinks the main slaughter was done a little further off, based on the musket balls his family has turned up over the years.) The Butlers were tenants for three and a half centuries until Jim did a deal with the Crown Estate, and bought the place.
What do they farm? Silage and sewage. It goes in great bucketloads into two vast anaerobic digesters, generating energy that Jim sells into the grid. Here he is (above left) with his manager. They call themselves farmers, and so they are, but they are also highly proficient engineers helping with the great transformation that is underway in our energy economy, weaning us off our dependence on foreign producers of fossil fuels.
I spoke last week at a conference at the British Academy organised by the Conservative Environment Network. The subject was the restoration of nature. Tom Holland, the Wiltshire-born historian and patron of the Stonehenge Alliance, argued strongly against the proposed tunnelling of the A303. I spoke about beavers - now back in these parts, damming the rivers as of old - about the Great Bustard, Wiltshire’s mascot bird which is making a comeback too, and about the absolute imperative to clean up our rivers (see my campaign here - I hope for news on that this week).
When I agreed to support the Government’s Plan B measures on 14 December, introducing compulsory mask-wearing and Covid passes for major venues, the Prime Minister and Health Secretary both assured me these rules would be repealed as soon as the data justified it. They kept their word, and Plan B is over. I now think they need to repeal the other rule we introduced on 14 December, requiring all NHS workers to be double-vaccinated against Covid-19 by the 1 April (meaning they need their first jab by the end of this coming week). I have been campaigning on this in Parliament and behind the scenes. I asked the PM a question in Parliament and was encouraged by his reply (see here). If we lifted this rule, we genuinely could claim to be the most open, least restrictive country - in terms of Covid rules - in the developed world.
The sick comedy of the No 10 parties drags on. As I have said all along, I fully recognise how serious it is when the people who make the rules don’t seem to follow them. I met last week with the daughter of Lionel Grundy OBE, former leader of Kennet District Council, former Deputy Chief Constable of Wiltshire, former Chairman of the Devizes Conservative Constituency Association, who died in hospital, alone, the day after the ‘work event’ that the PM attended in the No 10 garden on 20 May 2020. She was rightfully displeased, and I apologised once again for the Government and the PM.
Yet Parliament is not totally fixated on this matter. The day after the weekly joust at PMQs was Holocaust Memorial Day. I sat through the three-hour debate and experienced powerfully the reason why we remember in this way. The Holocaust was an attempt to eradicate a whole people, but it consisted of six million individual murders. Every time one of those six million is remembered - as happened repeatedly in the debate, with MPs recalling the names of relatives or people they’d simply read about - the Nazis are defeated once again. Most moving to me was Alex Sobel, Labour MP for Leeds North West, who spoke through tears about ‘how small my family is’, lacking all the cousins he should have had because their parents were not allowed to live.
The next day was a ‘sitting Friday’. Parliament usually skips Fridays so everyone can work in their constituencies, but sometimes the time is needed for Private Members Bills. These are generally non-partisan affairs, and this time we debated an important Bill to extend the time that cultural objects on loan to UK museums are exempt from seizure by the courts in the event of legal disputes. This seems arcane but will greatly strengthen the UK’s role as the hub of global cultural exchange. I made a faintly flippant but actually seriously-intended speech about the superior status of the Wiltshire Museum, home of the artefacts of one of the oldest civilisations in the world whose stuff we can still see and handle. See here. I also spoke (see here) on another Bill that gives official status to a much newer (but still 250 years old) native cultural phenomenon: British Sign Language. The Bill was brought in by the Labour MP Rosie Cooper, the child of deaf parents, and was a fitting tribute to them and her.
I have had a number of meetings and conversations this week about the Northern Ireland Protocol and the threat it represents to the Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement - and the threat that suspending it unilaterally, by means of Article 16 of the Protocol, may represent too. This unfinished bit of Brexit is as vexed as ever. Yet while we debate it I am reminded of Churchill’s famous line describing the moment in July 1914, during a conference on Ireland held in London, when the news arrived of Austria’s ultimatum to Serbia: ‘The parishes of Fermanagh and Tyrone faded back into the mists and squalls of Ireland, and a strange light began to fall upon the map of Europe.’
We may be on the brink of a new war in Europe. Russia has forces on the Ukrainian border that are almost double the size of the entire British Army. Plainly we cannot play a major role in the defence of the Ukraine. Yet I am proud of what the UK is doing to rally Europe and NATO against Russian aggression. It is a shame that Germany, in particular, is so beholden to Russian gas supplies that it cannot make more than a token objection to what is happening. It all goes to show we need our own energy sources - and a bigger army.
