Give us each day our daily bread

Why the political parties cannot understand farming.

James Cary

James Cary is a writer of situation comedy for BBC TV (Miranda, Bluestone 42) and Radio (Think the Unthinkable, Hut 33).

A man stands looking baleful next to a row of red tractors

Jeremy Clarkson re-considering the farming life.

Amazon Studios.

Go to the Labour Party’s ten election pledges. Search for the word ‘farm’. I’ll wait.

You’re not going to do that, are you? Fair enough. Let me tell you happens when you do. Nothing. You won’t find the word ‘farm’. That absence is revealing.

Or is it? Am I just being parochial? I’m not a farmer, but the son of a farmer and raised on a dairy farm in Somerset. It was a relief to my parents that I didn’t want to follow them – and every other Cary throughout history – into the family business, as the good years were clearly coming to an end. My parents sold their herd of cows a few years before Mad Cow Disease. They bought sheep for a variety of slightly perverse incentives. After a few years they discovered sheep are the worst, since they find all kinds of imaginative ways to die. The only bit of luck they had on the sheep was selling them before the Foot and Mouth epidemic hit.

Farmers in the UK have gotten used to being ignored by politicians, even though 70 per cent of the UK’s land is farmed. So what’s the plan for how over two-thirds of the country is going to be managed, given that Labour are certain to win? It’s hard to tell.

I found a more detailed manifesto on the Labour Party website, based around five Labour policies called ‘Let’s get Britain’s future back’. Idiotic nonsensical slogans notwithstanding, I did find one mention of the word ‘farm’. But only once. And it was part of the word ‘windfarm’. Labour is more interested in the farming of wind than the farming of wheat, cattle or vegetables. That managed air might explain where their slogan came from.

It is no wonder that the rural communities don’t trust Labour. According to FarmersGuide.co.uk, only 28 per cent said “they believe Labour understands and respects rural communities and the rural way of life”. But it’s not all bad news for Labour. The Tories are trusted even less, having dropped down to only 25 per cent. In short, the people in the countryside have no confidence in politicians.

The reason agricultural policy gets so complicated is because we have a great deal of knowledge but no wisdom.

You need only to watch Clarkson’s Farm to understand why this is the case. Farmers have been subject to an enraging mixture of overregulation and political indifference. Some of this has been Brexit. Some has been bureaucratic incompetence.

But there is another more fundamental problem. I discovered it when reading The National Food Strategy. This was a document courageously commissioned by the Conservatives in the hope that someone else would come up with some coherent policies for the countryside. It runs for hundreds of pages plus footnotes and sources and is an impressive piece of work. It pulls together issues around land use, food security, climate change, food inequality and obesity.

These issues are all interconnected. In fact, they are interdependent. How can they not be? You have to consider them all together. But once you open these cans of worms you end up with all kinds of other questions about pesticides, genetic modification, food waste and the identity of the maniac canning worms in the first place.

The reason agricultural policy gets so complicated is because we have a great deal of knowledge but no wisdom. We understand crops on a molecular level. We can design gigantic machinery to efficiently administer the correct dosage of pesticides to individual plants. We can theorise about animal bedding until the cows come home. But we can’t make decisions. That requires wisdom.

Wisdom is discernment, choosing between two good things – or making a decision based on the lesser of two evils. We can’t do that, because we can’t decide what is very good, what is good, what is okay and what is evil. Everything is practical pragmatic politics. You do what works. Except how do you define ‘what works’? For whom? Based on what?

Because we can’t make decisions, we end up having to balance entirely valid concerns about climate, obesity, food inequality, subsidies and the life cycles of bees. But we can’t do it. It’s too complicated. It produces anomalies and perverse incentives. The result is middle-aged men taking their own lives because TB-ridden badgers have ended up with more legal protections than tenant farmers.

We would do well to look to our ancestors. They lacked our granular knowledge but they had wisdom which, according to the Bible, begins with ‘the fear of the Lord’. They ploughed the fields and scattered the good seed on the land. They understood that our food doesn’t come from our brains, our labs, our factories or our highly integrated just-in-time delivery systems. Our food comes from God. As the Psalmist writes:

He makes grass grow for the cattle,
     and plants for people to cultivate—
     bringing forth food from the earth:
wine that gladdens human hearts,
     oil to make their faces shine,
     and bread that sustains their hearts.

Psalm 104

That’s why our predecessors ask for God’s blessing on their tools on Plough Monday in early January. It explains ‘Rogation days’ in the spring when the entire congregation would wander round the fields asking for God’s blessing. There was Lammastide when the harvest was beginning to ripen in early August. And every Sunday, the congregations prayed this central line of the Lord’s prayer: ‘Give us this day our daily bread’.

Jesus was good at bread. He was so good, he didn’t even need wheat to make it. He could feed five thousand families from a handful of loaves. It’s interesting that avowedly atheist regimes – like Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China – end up with mass starvation.

Our own society has turned its back on God. We have made ourselves gods. And after much consultation and two hundred pages of background and policy – plus foot notes - it turns out that food is a lot harder than we thought. Omniscience and omnipotence are really handy which it comes to a coherent plan for 70 per cent of the land in the UK. Rather than another National Food Strategy, let’s just have Psalm 104. Right now, our farmers are prepared to try anything.

Article

Comment

Digital

General Election 24

Politics

7 June 2024

4 min read

Are we really our vote?

Elections exacerbates the worst of our digital personality.

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Associate Minister at Holy Trinity Clapham, London.

A AI generaed montage shows two politicans back to back surrounded by like, share and angry icons.

The divide

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

All the world’s a stage. Never more so than in a general election. Amidst the usual stunts and gimmicks of political leaders in election season (and much of the drama unintended or badly scripted) we too have become the performers. It doesn’t matter that Rishi and Keir are ‘boring’ - the digital space has created platforms for us also to posture and present our political positions. But in acting for the crowd, I worry that we’re losing a sense of who we are.

If fame is the mask that eats the face of its wearer, then we’re all at risk of losing ourselves. Absurd! You might say, I’m not famous! But we have become mini celebrities to our tens and tens, if not hundreds or thousands of followers. Every post, story, or reel is an opportunity to project who we are and what we’re about, and what we think. Times columnist James Marriott goes so far as to write that ‘the root of our modern problem is the way opinion has become bound up with identity. In the absence of religious or community affiliations our opinions have become crucial to our sense of self.’

A recent study by New York University shows that many people in America are starting with politics as their basis for their identity. They say, "I'm a Democrat or a Republican first and foremost", and then shifting parts of their identity around like ethnicity and religion to suit their political identity. I’ve stopped being surprised when I see someone’s Twitter bio listing their ideology before anything else that might be core to their identity. But are we really our vote, or is there more to us than that?

The platform is a precarious place to position yourself, as is the harsh glare of the smartphone blue light.

If politics is the mask that we are presenting to the world, then we are engaging in a hollowing out of our representative democracy. Who needs an MP if we’re all directly involved? Don't get me wrong – I'm not in favour of apathy, inaction, or even lack of protest. But we elect members of parliament because we can’t all be directly engaged all of the time. Speaking all the time, about all of the things. Strong opinions used to be the possessions of those who had too much time on their hands… now you can be busy watch and pass on a meme in a matter of seconds without proper reflection and engagement. And so we’ve imported the very worst of student politics into our everyday digital lives and identities.

Student politics is the often-formative, immature peacocking of ideologies one way or the other. It also often reduces others to caricatures, and the campus culture has increasingly become one that cancels rather than listens and illuminates. And so, the loudest voices dominate and intimidate others to comply. Someone I barely know recently sent me an invitation to reshare a strong opinion on social media. We’ve never spoken about this topic, and they have no idea if I've in fact developed an opinion on it. Marriott writes, ‘For many, an opinion has achieved the status of a positive moral duty… the implication: to reserve judgement is to sin.’ And without a merciful judge, sin means shame: not just what I do is bad, but who I am is bad too.

The dopamine hit we get from these short bursts of antisocial media use is killing us. Martin Amis said that 'Being inoffensive, and being offended, are now the twin addictions of the culture.' That was 1996. Now engaging in politics in the era of the smartphone, we are addicted to the current age’s offended/being inoffensive dichotomy. Like the drug that it is, wrongly used, it will disfigure us as it propels us to play the roles the crowds want. The platform is a precarious place to position yourself, as is the harsh glare of the smartphone blue light.

Every general election transforms the wooden floorboards of school halls into holy ground.

Countless commentators have offered the wisdom that you are who you are when nobody’s watching. But we’re all watching, all the time. First, we had the Twitter election, then the Facebook election, and now political parties have recently launched accounts on TikTok (all the while wondering if they are going to try to ban it). What we need is a post-social media election. If the world is facing impending doom, then we don’t need doomscrolling to help. Whether it’s activism or slacktivism, our politics need not be our identity. We need a greater light source that reveals our truest selves, and helps us to be fully ourselves. This ‘audience of one’ is a much simpler, if not easier, way to live.

After all, a secret ballot means nobody’s watching, and we don’t have to broadcast our vote, unless we really want to. On the 4th July, the ‘only poll that matters’ is private. We step out of the spotlights of our screens, and we cast a vote for the kind of leaders we want. Every general election transforms the wooden floorboards of school halls into holy ground.

We’d do well to treat the online world as a sacred space too, and each person as a sacred person. Perhaps it’s time not only for a general election, but also a personal election: to step out of the spotlight, and the light of our phones, and quietly cast a vote for who we want to be.