Is John Bull the fascist heading for the dustbin of history?
PALL JOHNSON
0 n Saturday morning I went, as I often do, to the Farmers' Market, which operates at the back of Kensington Place in Notting Hill. It was bitterly cold, and I wondered yet again at their courage and tenacity. These men and women drive up from Dorset and Lincolnshire, from Kent and the Midlands, and all points, to sell fresh produce direct. They are notable for two things: their politeness and their fun, neither easy to keep up during the long purgatory through which they are passing. They bring with them superb vegetables and fruit — a dozen different kinds of apple, for instance, of which they will offer you slices to taste — fresh fish from the rivers and fish farms, amazing varieties of mushroom, cheeses to make the mouth water, butter and pâtés, pies and tarts, the finest eggs, succulent smoked salmon, chickens and ducks ready for roasting, anything indeed which an ingenious farmer now produces, and all at bargain prices. The latest catastrophe has knocked out the red meat, but ranks were filled by other goods. There was a lady selling honey, not just to eat but in the form of different cosmetics and polishes. A man offered mouthwatering oyster-mushroom sandwiches. Another operated a cider stall serving steaming hot grog. There is about this market a delightful air of improvisation and invention, of easy familiarity and good talk, of jokes and earthy friendliness. It tits incongruously well into the Notting Hill atmosphere of pop millionairesses and razorsharp politicians, of writers and television monsters, of professional wits and rogue journalists.
People say that English farming is finished, but that is nonsense. There have been worse times in the past. It is evident even from the Domesday Book that English farmers were shrewd and resilient. In the 18th century they invented modern agriculture, the work not just of rich men such as Coke of Norfolk but of many a yeoman farmer of limited means but imagination and energy. It was the golden age of English wheat, beautifully recorded in the watercolours of Peter de Wint, who had a passion for painting cornfields at harvest time. The repeal of the Corn Laws did not immediately affect our farms. But nemesis came in the late 1870s, when the new American railroads made it possible to ship grain from the vast new farms of the Midwest to our market at prices with which English farmers could not cominte. But they recovered and enjoyed good days in the early years of the 20th century.
Then in 1920 came the between-the-wars slump, when, it was said, more land changed hands in a single year than at any time since the Norman Conquest. By the early 1930s the price of land was so low that Henry Williamson, author of Tar/ca the Otter, was able to buy 1,000 acres of prime land in East Anglia for less than the asking price of £1,000. The uplifting saga of how he turned this near-derelict patch, over eight years, into a fully productive estate can be read in his book, The Story of a Norfolk Farm (1941). He was one of a number of farmers who fought against the trend of discouragement and despair in the 1930s. I remember as a boy studying the cartoons of Strube in the Daily Express, which featured a long, skeletal character leaning hopelessly on his rake and labelled 'Idle Acres'. Then, suddenly, came wartime 'Dig for Victory' policies and all-out production at top prices.
The decision of the postwar Labour government to continue wartime support policies kept the farms busy and innovative. That was another golden age. The National Farmers' Union, with its proud headquarters in Knightsbridge, was a power in the land. In the 1950s and 1960s the cry went up that our farmers were leather-bedded' — Bernard Levin used to write ferocious articles on this theme. But the policy certainly encouraged investment, I remember Dick Crossman, whose wife Anne owned Prescote Manor in Oxfordshire and the 360-acre farm attached to it, saying that, as a result of the government rules and tax regime, they had bought every possible piece of machinery they could think of and were always searching the catalogues for more. Those were the days for English farmers! Aneurin Bevan sold his London house in Cliveden Place to buy a 54-acre farm in the Chilterns. Asheridge Farm cost him £9.000, an enormous sum in the mid1950s, and to pay it he had to take out a £6,000 mortgage. Whether Nye was a good farmer I don't know. When his friend Archie Lush came down to Asheridge and was shown the 'pedigree herd', he exclaimed, 'Those are the most miserable lot of cows I ever saw in my life.' On the other hand, Nye had some good advisers, such as John Mackie. MP, said to be one of the best farmers in the country. Quite a few prominent Labour people had farms then. Jim Callaghan, for instance, bought himself one in Sussex. When fanning issues came up, there were plenty of Labour voices, well-informed and persuasive, to stick up for the countryside and ensure it got a fair deal. Indeed, one Labour MP was even a Master of Foxhounds. Labour was a much more broad-based party in those days, with people from a wide variety of backgrounds, not just full-time professional politicians and lawyers.
Today, by contrast, New Labour's backroom strategists see those who work in the countryside as what they call 'natural fascists', whose eventual elimination would be 'no bad thing'. Hence the recent disasters may be 'blessings in disguise'. So put out the dustbin of history'. Odd, isn't it, to think that the universal symbol of an Englishman was once John Bull, the yeoman farmer, with his top-boots and hard, square hat? But many New Labour intellectuals, in their ignorant, tunnel-vision way, regard John Bull as a fascist too, and the England of those days as a fascist country.
For a government carelessly to allow its agriculture to slide into crisis is an act of folly almost beyond comprehension, as history shows again and again. The only example I know of where a regime has deliberately destroyed the agricultural sector is Peron's Argentina in the 1940s, turning what was then the seventh richest country in the world into a byword for inflation, decay and instability. Only after half a century of misery is the country at last reviving. But then Peron was a genuine fascist, of the radical friendof-Labour variety.
The countryside will recover, for modern farmers, far from being stick-in-the-muds, are immensely resourceful, quick to spot new gaps in the market and to switch from an obsolescent product to a selling one. I rather like their approach to life. They are among the few people nowadays who have no debilitating ideology, no prejudices (as opposed to convictions based on long experience), and who see nature whole, as an infinitely complex series of interactions into which humankind fits perfectly well if it obeys nature's rules, but exposes itself to condign punishment if it ignores them and takes short cuts. Farmers don't need advice — they get too much of it anyway, most of it bad — but they do need our sympathy, and our prayers. If only we had a great poet to sing their song and touch hardened urban hearts!
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