Labour will protect and invest in rural farming communities, shadow minister pledges

Speaking to The Yorkshire Post ahead of the National Farmers' Union conference next week, Jim McMahon said that Labour is now “aggressively” going after the vote of rural Tories, which he feels they have abandoned.

“Labour will only form a majority government with a commanding majority if we make inroads into those seats in our rural and coastal communities, and I'm confident that we can do that," he said, but admitted that “some of the bigger landowners” would never back the party.

“People never learn the right lessons from politics. The Tories have taken the “prize” of the Red Wall, without learning the lessons of the Red Wall.

“They need not to be careful of not making the mistakes that Labour made in those rural and coastal seats because Labour is coming for them.”

Mr McMahon said that farmers are currently seeing compounding issues from the pandemic, Brexit and the cost of living crisis, seen now in changes to farming payments, and a government that has “dragged its feet” on labour shortages.

“The human consequence of that isn't really understood,” he said.

“If you think about the herd you might have reared or the poultry you might have been tending to, to be decimated within a week, that has a real impact, not just on the financial ability to keep your head above water, it has an impact on you, as a person.

“The benefit of those higher prices isn't being passed to the farmers, they’re not seeing their livelihoods better, they’re not seeing that their overheads are firmer than they were before.”

“They're feeling squeezed on both ends,” he added.

Two major issues facing farmers in the country are over land usage, and how to balance the needs of the business with concerns over the environment. Mr McMahon said Labour has an answer to both.

“There is no national security without food security, and Labour is the party of our national security,” he said, adding that Labour will bring forward policies on the financial viability of farms, as well as land use.

“At the moment land use in England and Wales is mainly market driven,” he adds.

“What comes with that is if you have a market skewed towards a particular land use, that undermines our national security on food, and we are seeing that.

“If you look at carbon-offsetting schemes, there are firms that will take carbon credits from multinational polluters, and they'll use that money to buy up family farms.

“In Carmarthenshire, there were whole swathes of farms being bought essentially for carbon offset schemes where conifers are being planted on what was food production land.

“That is nonsense. If it is top grade food-production land it needs to be used for food production.

“A land use strategy may sound very boring but the government should have a view on this and at the moment they don’t.”

When asked about the extra burden that farmers are given to be environmental champions for projects like rewilding, and whether there was a tension between farming and environmentalism, he said that he viewed the two as “complementary.”

“The best farmers are custodians of animal welfare, and custodians of nature, the best farms, and we need to make sure that we embrace that, and we encourage more of that,” he said.

“There will always be a spectrum of those that are absolutely at the best leading edge of rewilding, of nature, of habitat creation, together alongside good food production.

“And there'll be others who don't believe that they're custodians who just want to maximise high yields of poultry, for instance.

“I suspect most farmers are somewhere in the middle, and actually it’s how we support them to make the transition from being somewhere in the middle to being best in class.”

He said the change to environmental farming is like the transition to electric vehicles, adding: “You've got to make that transition a just transition, a fair transition.”

“You can’t just flick a switch and say, well, it doesn't matter what you drove yesterday, tomorrow you're going to drive something else, and it’s the same and farming.

“And that will require investment.”

Mr McMahon said that he will also make sure that there is a “rural test” and “coastal test” to policies that are outside his own brief as shadow environment secretary.

“When we're thinking about housing policy, there's a very clear offer there in terms of second homeownership to make sure that people aren't priced out of their local community.

“We do need to make sure that you have a housing market that supports local people being able to stay in their areas.”

“I think that’s where the Government really has taken their eye off the ball, to really underestimate the fear and the worry that it brings if people don't feel safe in their community, or the only future the kids or their grandkids have is one outside the area where they were raised, not inside.

“Those are fundamental attacks on people's security.”

Tomorrow evening, Thérèse Coffey, the Environment Secretary, is addressing a conference in Washington, to outline how UK-US cooperation is important for global food security, as well as paying tribute to the farmers of Ukraine.

She is expected to say: “Farmers are the original friends of the earth, the first to understand that making space for nature can and must go alongside food production. This is not mutually exclusive, but absolutely symbiotic.”