The UK Real Estate Investment and Infrastructure Forum (UKREiiF) took place in Leeds last month. Reform were out in force, making policy announcements with the confidence of a party already in government. Although they hold no national power, many of their newly elected councillors are clearly behaving as though they do.
Among the familiar themes were opposition to solar farms on agricultural land and renewed enthusiasm for fracking. But another phrase is beginning to crop up in Reform speeches, council debates and social media posts: food security.
On the face of it, that sounds entirely reasonable. Every country should think about the resilience of its food supply, particularly after the shocks of COVID, the war in Ukraine and rising geopolitical tensions. There is a perfectly respectable debate to be had about how much food Britain should produce for itself.
Increasingly, however, “food security” is being used as a convenient argument against net zero policies, particularly renewable energy projects. The slogan is simple. Don’t build solar farms. Grow food instead.
Like many simple slogans, the reality is rather more complicated.
The idea that Britain should become largely self-sufficient in food has an unexpectedly long political history. It resembles what economists call agricultural autarky: the belief that a nation should minimise dependence on foreign trade and become self-reliant.
That idea has appeared across the political spectrum, but in Britain it originates with Jorian Jenks, a senior figure in the British Union of Fascists whose book The Land and The People promoted a romantic vision of rural self-sufficiency rooted in nationalism. After the war Jenks became influential within the early organic farming movement through the Soil Association, leaving an intellectual legacy that still prompts uncomfortable historical questions about parts of Britain’s environmental movement.
Whether today’s advocates know that history is another matter entirely. Most almost certainly do not. But the slogan has a pedigree that deserves to be understood. This is an idea with a very long and unpleasant pedigree on the far right.
There is also a much more practical problem.
Britain has what gardeners know as the “hungry gap” — those weeks in late winter and early spring when there is remarkably little to harvest beyond hardy vegetables. I tried feeding my own family from locally grown produce for several years and discovered that there is only so much cabbage and turnip children are prepared to eat.
More importantly, Britain has not had a sufficiently large agricultural workforce to harvest all of its own crops for centuries.
The enclosure of the common lands transformed English agriculture, concentrating land ownership into fewer hands and driving many rural labourers towards the growing industrial towns. Those who rebelled against the seizing of their land were sent to Australia as convicts. The Highland Clearances displaced communities across Scotland, while poverty and land shortages encouraged millions of Irish people to emigrate during the nineteenth century. Whether to Britain’s factories, North America or Australia, these changes steadily reduced the pool of agricultural labour available at home.
Long before the Second World War, British farmers relied heavily on seasonal Irish workers to bring in the harvest.
After the war, the Attlee government established organised schemes to recruit European labour for agriculture. Even then there were labour shortages. When I was at primary school, the October half-term was still widely known as “tatty picking fortnight”, timed so that children from poorer families could help lift the potato crop.
Today the system depends overwhelmingly on seasonal migrant workers.
If Britain genuinely wanted to maximise food production and become substantially more self-sufficient, we require more seasonal agricultural workers, not fewer.
Many of the constituencies that have recently elected Reform councillors — places such as Skegness and parts of Lincolnshire — already depend on migrant labour to keep their agricultural industries functioning. The immigration that attracts so much political anger is, in many cases, precisely what allows Britain’s food to be grown and harvested.
That doesn’t mean there are no legitimate questions about immigration or food resilience. There plainly are.
But it does mean that the slogan of “food security” collides rather awkwardly with another of Reform’s central political messages.
The uncomfortable truth is that a country determined to grow significantly more of its own food would probably need a larger seasonal workforce than it has today.
Sometimes political slogans are not contradicted by their opponents.
They are contradicted by the practical realities of the policies they imply.