IT’S A terrible shame that British farmers seem to lack the spirit of most of their European counterparts, particularly the French, whose spectacular protests in recent days have gladdened the hearts of all who long for freedom from the unaccountable forces that assail us. The widespread protests are gathering momentum across every country in Europe with Belgian farmers blockading the port of Zeebrugge to try to prevent the importation of cheaper food from abroad, produced free of the considerable environmental restrictions the EU has imposed against its own farmers. The French have almost closed the motorways into Paris and besieged the Rungis wholesale food market upon which Paris depends for its daily deliveries of 8,000 tonnes of food. In one memorable escapade they have spread thousands of tonnes of topsoil across one carriageway of the motorway and sown it with grass.
The farmers’ grievances are broadly similar in each country: farm gate prices have reduced by 10 per cent in 12 months in 2022 to 2023, exacerbated by cheap imports; restrictive EU regulations over nitrogen fertiliser and other ‘pollutants’ such as farmyard manure; the imposition of fuel duty and other imposts, and taking farmland out of production either by confiscation as in Holland or requiring farmers to leave at least 4 per cent of their land for ‘biodiversity’.
Farmers everywhere in the EU and more broadly in the West are now involved in a fight for their – and our – existence. Of course we know (or ought to know) that farming feeds us and maintains the land. But we also ought to know that in their husbandry of the soil farmers daily confront practical truth. They don’t deal in abstractions, but hard reality. And they know what happens if they ignore that reality.
Settled farming stands against the will of the globalists who despise everything that farming represents – the local, the traditional, the self-reliant, the enduring. Do not be deceived. The globalists aim to subvert, break down and destroy the bonds that hold our society together; they will then be free to remake the world along lines that give them ultimate power. Theirs is not a utopian ‘green’ project, as is widely misunderstood; rather it is a dystopian effort intended to destroy everything that stands in their way, enrich themselves and entrench their control.
Lenin knew, over a hundred years ago, that Russia could not establish the ultimate collectivist state without breaking and destroying the millions of independent peasants who formed by far the majority of the Russian population. There was no question of reaching a compromise and co-existing because the two were utterly incompatible. The peasants stood as a force of conservatism in the way of the Marxism that the Bolsheviks were intent on imposing. Lenin smeared the peasantry as a ‘petty bourgeois’ class who in the Marxists’ view, were inimical to the interests of the ‘proletariat’ because they steadfastly opposed the Bolshevik project.
But the peasants could not prevail against the ruthlessness of the Bolshevik state which subdued them with unspeakable brutality. The result was famine, destruction, cruelty and death on a scale that we in the countries of the soft West find almost impossible to take in. Had all the people stood together with their peasants, the state might have had a much harder time of it and could have fallen. But so wickedly divisive was the propaganda caricaturing the selfish rich peasant (the kulak) hoarding grain and the poorer peasantry that they were set against each other and not supported by the very people who stood to benefit from their survival.
Now it’s all happening again, but with a different playbook. The globalists need to destroy the farmers otherwise their project will founder on the rock of their resistance. This time, the great utopian scheme that the ‘elite’ intends to put into effect to subdue them is not the overt imposition of communism. That manifestly failed. The holy grail of this revolution is to save the earth from ‘climate change’ by reducing ‘carbon emissions’ until we achieve ‘Net Zero’. And, as before, standing in the way of this fantasy are the farmers whose work inevitably involves emitting ‘carbon’ and other ‘pollutants’ in the production of food and managing the land. They are sitting ducks in the globalists’ sights. They are to be forced to stop producing food and abandon their farmland to wilderness and planting trees to ‘capture carbon’.
This is different only in form from Lenin’s fury against the peasantry. The purpose of this current onslaught has nothing to do with saving the planet from ‘climate change’. It’s about using land to create ‘carbon credits’ that very rich people and large companies can buy to offset the ‘carbon emissions’ from their private planes and their other activities. To achieve this, farmers must be coerced into using their land not to produce food but to make it available as ‘carbon sinks’. They will be able to sell the units of carbon ‘sequestered’ by ‘re-wilding’ on long-term contracts that will prevent them for decades from using their land to produce food.
In this way, the global powers seek to pierce to the very heart of nation states by breaking the independence of every farmer, those stubborn bastions of individual freedom. That’s why our liberty – not to say our national survival – depends on every one of us standing with the farmers and all the other brave men and women who are risking their livelihoods and, in some cases their lives, in protest. Let’s hope the hints are true that British farmers might be stirring themselves into action. There was due to be a meeting of farmers last night in Welshpool to discuss what action to take. We will add an update later.