Brexit - Farming, Planning - Bustards
This week I was credited (ok, partly credited) with the UK leaving the EU (see here by David Frost, our chief Brexit negotiator in 2019-20). This will confirm some readers’ dim view of me, but I was highly gratified. I maintain that Brexit was right because it is right for nations to be sovereign, but also because we will need greater agility (including the agility to strike strategic alliances with other European nations on issues of mutual interest) in what will be a tumultuous 21st century. It remains too early to see whether sovereignty and agility will pay off for the UK, but so far I don’t think I was wrong in backing Brexit.
The unfinished business of Brexit is Northern Ireland, however. We were so keen - well, Parliament and the media were so keen - to get a deal, any deal, with the EU to smooth our exit in 2019 that we deferred the most contentious aspect, the management of the border between the Republic and the UK that runs across the island of Ireland, to another day. First Boris and then Rishi cobbled together unsatisfactory holding positions which have essentially left NI in the EU’s customs arrangements, with an international border within the United Kingdom itself, i.e. in the Irish Sea between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The result is that for the first time in the history of our country a part of it is ruled, in part, by a foreign power, without even the vestigial formal influence that the UK enjoyed when we were members of the EU. Even WIlliam the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, ruled as King of England.
The current contorted arrangement exists because everyone agrees that if so much as a customs hut appears on the Irish border, the IRA will starting killing people again; and so we are compelled by the threat of republican violence to leave 1.2 million citizens of the UK subject to laws made in a foreign jurisdiction without any democratic accountability. And the UK government thus faces the terrible choice of diverging GB from NI - with new rules to take advantage of Brexit, but applying them only to GB - or aligning the whole of the UK, GB included, with EU rules. Labour is keen to do the latter, and would do so whether it maintained the Union or not. My Party has the twin ambition to exploit our Brexit freedoms AND to maintain the Union; we cannot do both under the present arrangements.
This is all relevant because on Friday Jim Allister, a Unionist MP, introduced a Private Member’s Bill to fix the problem by means of ‘mutual enforcement’, by which we maintain an invisible border on the island of Ireland but ensure all goods leaving the UK are compliant with EU rules. Within the whole of the UK, including NI, only British rules would apply to goods bought and sold here, and the whole of the UK could then happily diverge from the EU in areas where this is in our national interest. We might thus also be in a better position to do a trade deal with the US if we are not shackled to the doomed economy and politics of the EU.
In the end Labour MPs talked out Jim Allister’s bill. I only got to make a short intervention, reminding the House that the Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement specifically recognises the sovereignty of the UK over NI and the presence of an Irish border (see here). But I hope the debate has helped MPs remember that Brexit is not finished, and its opportunities are not fully open to us, while NI remains part of the EU customs system.
Farming, planning
I also spoke in the House to challenge a Labour member on the Inheritance Tax grab on farmland - the Family Farm Tax we are calling it - asking how on earth farmers are expected to pay 20% of the value of an acre worth over £10,000 when the yield of that acre is in the low hundreds of pounds. See here.
I spent time this week with residents and councillors concerned about inappropriate planning applications. As I’ve said before we urgently need commercial and industrial land to grow the economy of Wiltshire, attract businesses and professionals here, and ensure young people have jobs for the future. But we also need to respect the landscape, protect communities, and not overload further our crowded roads. This is the balance Wiltshire planners (thankfully not I) have to strike in respect of major applications in Ludgershall and at High Post near Amesbury.
Great Bustard
Ten years ago the retired policeman David Waters spent a year crawling on his stomach across the bogs and tundra of Russia and Ukraine, in pursuit of the Great Bustard, the heaviest flying bird on earth, once common in England but shot to extinction by the Victorians. He brought back some breeding pairs and now oversees a thriving colony on the edge of Salisbury Plain.
The Great Bustard is the official county bird of Wiltshire and I am the official Natural England Species Champion of the Great Bustard. This week I received an encouraging letter from Natural England saying they recognise the Bustard as a ‘medium priority for reintroduction’. This seems underwhelming to me but David says it’s great news. It came just in time for the opening of the Great Bustard Group’s official visitor centre in Enford Village Hall. Here’s David (mutton chops) with local historian and archaeologist Phil Harding, formerly of BBC Timeteam; and a range of stuffed Bustards (pictured above). More info here.
