Tough campaigning for farming freedom
Norfolk farmer Stuart Agnew is about to start lambing 1000 ewes, so he admits that campaigning as a UK Independence Party candidate isn”t going to be easy over the next few weeks.
But Mr Agnew says UKIP, which wants Britain to come out of the EU, needs members who are prepared to stick their head above the parapet and campaign for election.
He says that he wants to convince voters that none of the three main political parties can really deliver what they promise, on farming as well as other issues, because “everything is decided by Europe”.
It is the second time that Mr Agnew, who also grows cereals, sugar beet and has 16,000 chickens, has run for election. He ran for the Mid Norfolk seat in 2001 where he came fourth with 1333 votes.
marginal
This time he is running in the very marginal Norfolk North constituency – currently held by the Lib Dems – but he says that although the area is quite rural, farming is not a key issue for voters.
“We’ve had six husting debates and not one question has come from the floor about agriculture,” he says. “The big issues here are the closure of a local cottage hospital, immigration, education and the EU constitution.”
But Mr Agnew points out that UKIP does have specific farming policies including giving farmers freedom to farm without a lot of regulation and tighter rules on food imports.
“We want to let consumers decide what standards should apply to UK food production, but we would make sure they apply to imported food too,” he says.