Opinion: Government and farming have a ‘high conflict’ problem
© Phil Weedon “The government needs to rebuild trust with farming”. There’s a phrase I’ve heard a lot recently. I’ve said it myself. But over the past few weeks I’ve started to think that isn’t quite what’s wrong.
What’s happening between farming and government isn’t low trust so much as high conflict, and the two don’t get fixed the same way.
The journalist Amanda Ripley wrote a book, High Conflict, about what happens when a normal disagreement tips into something else.
Healthy conflict is two sides who disagree, but can still be talked round, curious enough to hear a good point even from someone they don’t like.
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High conflict is different, because it’s got a “them” in it. It stops being about the policy and starts being about identity: who these people are, and whether they’re even on your side to begin with.
Once you’re in it, you stop looking for the best evidence, and start looking for evidence that proves you’re right and they’re out to get you.
That’s where farming and government have landed. Watch what happens next time a policy drops, few will ask what problem it’s meant to solve, most will ask what fresh insult this is.
And I’d bet nobody in Whitehall is reading NFU statements looking for the fair point buried in there, either. They’re reading them as farmers kicking off again.
Ripley calls the thing underneath high conflict the understory – the real grievance nobody says out loud, because the row on the surface is easier to have.
For a lot of farmers, I don’t think this is really about inheritance tax or the SFI budget or any one policy. It’s decades of feeling unheard, undervalued, and treated as an afterthought by people who’ve never set foot on a farm and don’t much want to. The tax change didn’t create that feeling, it just confirmed it.
High conflict needs fuel, and there’s always someone doing well out of keeping it hot. Ripley calls them conflict entrepreneurs, and they’re on both sides of this one.
Some sit in Westminster, and some, if we’re honest, sit in farming, because outrage gets more shares than nuance.
I’m not saying farmers should stop being angry. Plenty of that anger is fair, and swallowing it helps nobody.
What I am saying is that if we stay stuck in high conflict, shouting at a “them” we’ve stopped being curious about, we hand the whole thing over to whoever’s loudest.
Government does exactly the same back. Nobody’s mind changes, nobody’s understory gets heard, and we just get louder and further apart, year after year, same argument, different budget.
Getting out of high conflict doesn’t mean giving in. It means someone has to get curious first, and ask what’s actually sitting underneath the other side’s position rather than just what they said in the press release.
I’d like to see that from government. I’d also like to see us do it ourselves, because we can’t ask for a skill we’re not willing to use.
We’re in a fight, and until both sides admit that’s what it actually is, we’ll keep having the same row dressed up as a new one, every single year, calling it a trust problem right up to the next protest.