I get seriously annoyed when letters appear in the media ignorantly attacking our farmers; suggesting that they are 'raking it in' and declaring that they are all getting EU payoffs for non-production.Certainly, the farmers in the cornfields of East Anglia do rather well with their EU subsidies but there is precious little cheer for pig breeders, sheep farmers, egg producers and the mixed farm economy elsewhere who also have to contend with wicked supermarket purchasing policies.
The Common Agricultural Policy was shamelessly a Gaullist invention through which eventually, vast amounts of our taxpayers' money would be funnelled into the pockets of relatively inefficient, French, peasant farmers.
The EU has systematically wrecked our ability to produce our own food and has deliberately overseen the winding down of food production in the UK at the same time as turning a typical farmer's life into a bureaucratic nightmare.
By the end of World War Two we produced the bulk of our own food - when we had to.
Today, that simply could not be repeated. I cannot lay hands on the statistic but I suspect that we now produce no more than 25% of our needs.
It is a policy intended to undermine our national sovereignty by making us fully dependent on the EU.
Scary!
