Adam Rickitt: The farce that is the Rural Payments Agency

A-lister Adam Rickitt reviews the importance of agriculture to British life and attacks Labour for its handling of the new system of farm payments.

In whatever form it takes, and over whatever country it presides, the role of any Government can be defined by two simple duties of care: to provide the best for its people, and to protect them from the worst.

Within our own nation the first of these covers the broad range of social, economic and political dilemmas that face our society, from NHS funding to policing, education to the environment, economic strength to political sovereignty. These are the issues that compete for the attention of politicians and pull for support from the Treasury but which any Government should strive to better for the empowerment and provision of its citizens.

The second issue is to always ensure the country is as well prepared as possible should disaster ever strike - be it on the military, environmental, medical or political fronts. By this we mean a Government should always ensure that her country is in a position to be able to exist and to thrive independently in the face of whatever future adversity may arise.

The three vital factors in this are the 3 “F’s”: Forces, Fuel and Food.

Our armed forces should always be fully supported and funded (failure number one for Tony and Gordon).  They should be able to protect their compatriots in wartime and be able to act swiftly, secure in the knowledge that the resources are always in place.  We should ensure that as a country we are independently able to sustain our lifeblood of power, in whatever form it takes (again get your heads out of the sand you two and start making the necessary choices). Finally we should ensure that as a country we always have the ability to feed ourselves should the worst happen and external sources be cut off.

Now this may all sound terribly dramatic but these are the fundamentals.  They have to be in place to ensure a nation’s ability to survive in the face of unknown future adversity.  With the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the familiar geo-politics that dominated the post WW2 world we inhabit a politically volatile and environmentally endangered planet, with no certain path before us. Without certainty as to where the next threat may lay, the need to plan for all eventualities is more acute than ever.

So it is that having been born and raised in a rural community I have been able to bare sad witness to this government’s total ineptitude in support of our farming community. Not only are these hard working men and women the custodians of our countryside, vital in the maintaining of our rural communities and economies, but they also provide the essential public service of providing fundamental resources should the need ever arise.