Editor’s View: 10 years on, Brexit to-do list is far from done
© Adobe Stock By the time you read this, the Makerfield by-election will have taken place, with Andy Burnham, the expected prime ministerial challenger, likely to win the seat.
If he then clears all the subsequent hurdles to make it into Number 10, the obligatory Cabinet reshuffle may well mean we get our 11th secretary of state for Defra since the Brexit referendum.
That would be a football team of politicians who have wearily tried, over the past decade, to achieve the goal of developing a fully fledged farm policy for England to replace the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy.
See also: Farmers hail hit Cereals show at Diddly Squat Farm
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And they are not there yet. Not least because, unlike any successful football team, they haven’t worked together – even when they’ve been on the same political side.
Add their devolved counterparts who are, and have been, doing likewise in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and you could fill up the subs bench as well.
At Defra, Emma Reynolds, who bears a striking resemblance to Alice from the Vicar of Dibley, is of course the latest well-meaning incumbent (tip of the hat to the wag who pointed the likeness out to me at Cereals).
She’ll be spending some time this week explaining the farming brief to her new colleague, Stephen Morgan, the first farming minister with facial hair since the Liberal Democrats’ David Heath (in office 2012-13).
The failure to land on a settled policy that has the support of the bulk of the industry goes a long way to explain why many farmers now feel so disgruntled with Brexit and everything that has happened in the decade since the vote took place.
This week we publish the results of a survey conducted to mark the anniversary, with a small majority of farming readers now saying they would vote to rejoin if there was a referendum tomorrow with that option on the ballot.
With the impending deal on dynamic alignment, we are instead heading towards another fudge that, for some, may be the worst of both worlds.
And as for farm support policy itself, it is stuck up to its axle in the clinging mud of shambolic IT, with Rural Payments Agency software unable to cope with an application for Sustainable Farming Incentive 2026 from someone with an existing agreement.
That is despite Defra as a whole spending more than £17m with external contractors on ICT services in January alone – the most recent month for which data is available.
It’s certainly a trickier problem to deal with than actual mud, which was barely an issue at last week’s Cereals event thanks to a combination of hard work and the helpful amount of stone in Diddly Squat’s soil.
The rain may have fallen steadily on day two, but the Farmers Weekly tent was packed out with punters to cheer on the Hawkstone Farmers Choir’s brilliant performance.
As our event coverage in the Arable section will show, it’s cheering how much innovation farmers and the industry are still pressing on with despite woeful financials in the sector.
And if this week also marks the beginning of the end of the bottleneck in the Strait of Hormuz, that will hopefully lower costs in due course as well.