Why Scotland's farmers face a post-Brexit massacre – and England’s don’t

Farmers in Scotland will go bust as their meats of the highest quality are forced to face open competition from the likes of chlorinated chicken or of castrated cattle injected with hormones to stiffen them up.

Banned while we were in the EU, these cheaper meats will start being let into our markets after the expected signing next month of a new trade deal with Australia. The UK Government is pushing for it as proof how a new policy of Global Britain can replace the EU. In practice, it means accepting the lower quality controls of non-European producers.

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A new financial regime is needed to replace the Common Agricultural Policy, which has kept our farmers afloat since we joined Europe in 1973. Otherwise, most would long ago have gone bust, because its subsidies compensate the great majority of Scottish farms that run at a loss.

Recent figures show the average farm earns £149,000 a year yet bears costs amounting to £168,000 a year. Dairy farming makes a reasonable profit but all the other types of agriculture lose money, or would lose it without the European subsidies, especially in remote areas.

With Brexit, all that is over. Instead, in a process already under way, the UK will look for separate individual deals with its trading partners. This is a complex task but one we must not shirk. Trade makes up 64% of the UK’s gross domestic product (compared with 26% in the US), and we could not live without it. For a start, we are right in the middle of hammering out a deal with Australia. Both nations are anxious to finish this by the time of the G7 summit in Cornwall next month.

It is a matter of pride for the pair of them, and will usefully show everybody else that two medium-sized economies are capable of doing business without bowing and scraping to bigger blocs. Under the deal, they would move over 15 years to a broad trading system free of tariffs or quotas. If agreement is reached by next month, it will set an example to many other countries planning to embark on trade talks for a new, more varied global system.

Inevitably, some existing arrangements will be discarded during the complex negotiations. These can involve vital national interests. Scotland’s benefits from the CAP include special measures to help with the problems of small producers in remote places.

We object that the new way of policy-making, as gifted to us by Brexit, will to an extent never known before impose control from London on farmers in Scotland. The UK Government takes the view that on a trading scene of growing complexity it makes sense to return agricultural powers straight from Brussels to London rather than have them divided with Edinburgh too.

The ruckus arises because, before the UK joined the EU, farming came under the control of two territorial departments, a big one in England and a small one for Scotland headed by our own Secretary of State. Now the subordination of both departments within the CAP is coming to an end, one obvious replacement would be for them to revert to the structure they gave up in 1973.

However, Boris Johnson and George Eustice want both to be united in one ministry run by the latter in London. With so much upheaval going on in government, they argue, it cannot be useful to coddle such an insignificant sector as Scottish agriculture. That’s what they say in London anyway. From Edinburgh, by contrast, this appears to be a plain power grab, spiriting away from the devolved system a sector that had belonged to it before devolution began.

The Department of Agriculture has been answerable to the Scottish Secretary since it was set up in 1909. The role foreseen for it now in effect introduces a new principle into the apparatus of British bureaucracy, that the UK Government can operate it as it likes without regard to what anybody at Holyrood might think. Policy run on English rather than Scottish lines can simply be imposed.

THIS has not escaped the attention of Ian Blackford, gentleman crofter and SNP leader at Westminster.

He is pointing out that, in the future case of agricultural free trade between the UK and Australia, the lower price on the world’s markets of beef and lamb from the other side could bankrupt farmers on this side.

Scottish producers suffer high costs for many reasons such as climate, terrain and transport, and not least because under the CAP they have still been selling meat of the highest quality to the world. Australian imports can remain of lower quality simply because the same standards are not imposed on them. In a new free trade area, Scots face ruin.

This gives Blackford a clear line to defend in the House of Commons, and I am sure he will do it with his usual eloquence. From my own point of view, I add that he would do it all the more so if the rank and file of his own party were to show less knee-jerk resentment towards the men and women of our agricultural community on the ground. Many are posh, and their image suffers from that. I wish we could recognise how, in running a big estate, they just do the job somebody has to do.

After Brexit, the big estate becomes the indispensable norm in Scotland beyond the central belt. Over much of our territory, 20 million acres altogether, economic life cannot easily be organised within any other structure than the big estate. In reality that is just as well because, after Brexit, most smaller farmers will go out of business.

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One reason I will vote for independence to follow straight on from this bourach is that rapid re-entry to the EU will be the only way forward. If the re-entry stalls, there may not be much Scottish agriculture left.

The CAP has worked in the interests of peasant farmers in the original six member states, with the high costs paid by food consumers. The UK, as a latecomer, always fitted awkwardly in. Peasant farming continued to die out anyway and was replaced by agribusiness on a huge scale, intent on capitalist exploitation of the land rather than on preserving quaint rural society.

That is why, if you drive anywhere across the North European Plain today, you will see few farms or fields, only expanses of single crops being gathered in by combine harvesters huffing and puffing away on the horizon.

While joining in the CAP, the UK continued to oppose its excesses and, on our own soil, adapt it somewhat to local conditions. A result today is support for innovative investments in niche markets, which is, in practice, handed over to wealthy and progressive English farmers. They keep ahead of the game through advanced technology and new products, as they have survived in adverse global conditions for the past 180 years.

A second result today can be found in the blanket subsidy that is the norm in Scotland and keeps farmers going who are too stretched for venturesome investments. I think the big English farmers will survive the fresh upheaval of Brexit in reasonably good shape. Their 45 years of EU regulation have made them producers of the highest quality, offering the world meat and other products second to none. By contrast, I fear Scots farmers face a massacre.