With Putin’s warmongering having further exposed the fragility of our food supply, it is worth reflecting on another Vladimir, Lenin, who wrote over a hundred years ago that ‘Every society is three meals away from chaos’. During the COVID pandemic people fought in shops over loo rolls – imagine the reaction if we were to run short of food.

Some Tory politicians think the UK doesn’t need to worry about growing its own food, because we’re relatively wealthy and can buy what we need from other countries. North Dorset’s MP Simon Hoare recently wrote about the need to sustainably increase UK food production, but he focussed entirely on livestock farming and claimed there is no ‘argument to sustain’ a decline in the livestock sector. West Dorset MP Chris Loder has similarly written about how effective pastureland is as a carbon sink, and said that science does not support a plant-based diet. I respectfully suggest they both need to look more closely at the evidence, perhaps starting with DEFRA’s reports.
Livestock is presently the major part of Dorset’s farming industry, but we can and must change that. At present we have to import so much else of what we eat. Animal farming is a hugely inefficient way of producing food, using large areas of land to produce relatively little food. Around 71 per cent of UK land is used for agriculture, and 72 per cent of that is grassland for grazing. Most of UK-grown wheat, barley and oats is used for animal feed, while we import almost half our fresh vegetables and 84 per cent of our fruit. That cannot continue.
With the changing climate we cannot rely on other countries to be able to grow what we need.
We have to recognise that farming is the most important occupation, bar none. Farmers must be properly rewarded for their efforts, and we need to encourage younger people into the profession. We must incentivise farming that produces more of the food varieties we need, and in organic ways that regenerate the health of our depleted soils, make our waterways clean again, increase biodiversity and capture carbon. It can be done, and our healthy future depends on it.
Ken Huggins,
North Dorset Green Party

Well, this 12 year bush tucker trial is beginning to come to a head. I am no celebrity but what with Royal Mail, nurses, ambulance and rail strikes, the cost of food, energy, services (you name it and it is up), the immigration mess, the ineptitude of Brexit implementation, water quality, social care misery… I am minded to get out of here!
We won’t go, though.
We will persist and adapt. We will listen and work with people with shared values to define a much better future.
The thought leadership of the nation does not reside with the Conservative party. Time and again their focus, their whole strategy, is to cling on to the people who voted for them, a minority of the population.
There are two hard years ahead, though. Despite having less than any mandate at all, this government will cling on until the last possible moment. It will continue to use the tactics we have already seen in the autumn statement of postponing the more acute funding pain until after the next election. Remember that note left by Labour in 2010, “There is no money”?
We will continue to see swathes of Tory MPs, including the new crop, declining to fight again. In sum, they know they are losing so they are setting up the next government to fail and meanwhile they are looking after their own. They are frail, fraught and full of fractious factions. Vote them off the show now, I say!

Doughnut economy
So, to the positives: at our Annual General Meeting we were delighted to welcome Sarah Dyke, Somerset Councillor and prospective parliamentary candidate for Somerton and Frome. It was inspiring to hear how our neighbours are bringing new, radical ideas to bear, including, for example, the principles of Doughnut Economics. We are familiar with economic models based on the flow of work and money between employers and employees which results in the supply of – and demand for – goods and services. Simple enough. The problem is that we are trashing our environment as we go and leaving a trail of inequality and want in our wake.
Doughnut economics seeks a fair social foundation for the economy whilst not breaking our planet’s ecological constraints. We need to maximise the re-use of goods and services and properly harness and recognise the value of the unpaid inputs we make as parents, in running our households, in helping others in our communities and at work. This isn’t the wokerati at work. This is the sustainable future of the human race at stake. Without thinking like this, the nationalists, the plutocrats, the factionalists get to win. They do not create, they destroy. Witness poor Ukraine.
Mike Chapman
Liberal Democrats Blackmore Vale

Westminster policy has a habit of ignoring the less populated rural areas of the country, says MP Simon Hoare

For a little too long for comfort, the important policy initiative of Levelling Up has been translated in the media, by commentators and by much of the voting public as being solely reserved for towns and cities north of Birmingham.
No one will doubt the desirability of making our former industrial towns attractive places to live, work and socialise; in so doing we better balance the national economy but also relieve pressures for house building and economic development south of Birmingham.
However, to see it as Northern-facing only is a mistake and it is one where the Government needs to be doing more to demonstrate that there is something in Levelling Up for everyone, irrespective of where they live in the country.

Dorset musketeers
If buses come along in threes, then so do Dorset Tory MPs seeking to catch the eye of Mr Speaker in an important recent Commons debate on Levelling Up our rural areas.
Messrs Drax, Hoare and Loder – the political equivalent of the Three Musketeers – spoke up for our county. I spent most of my time talking about the need to ruralise the rubric. This is not the sexiest of topics but it is vital.
One could be forgiven for thinking that too many central government funding equations are still rooted in calculation methodology which specifically ignores the pressures of delivering public and other services in rural areas.
Steps have been taken recently to recognise this in terms of school funding; I spoke up for such changes in Parliament on many occasions and we are now seeing the benefit of the rural location of schools being taken into account.

A Rural Tzar
Too many of our funding rules have been written in Whitehall for Whitehall by people who think that a country walk is a saunter round Hampstead Heath. In my speech I called for Government to appoint a Rural Tzar (or Rural Squire?) who would have a cross-departmental brief to ensure that policies had been ‘rural proofed’.
What do I mean by that?
Well, that it has taken into account a sparser population, the fact that the age profile is older and that delivery of, for example, in-home adult social care is more difficult given that customers may live many miles apart.
That our village school buildings are older and therefore more expensive to heat and maintain.
That housing is less plentiful and therefore more costly, making it more expensive for youngsters starting out on their careers to get on the local housing ladder.
That our police and ambulance services face geographic challenges – four policemen in central Manchester, for example, cover far more people per square mile than the same in rural Dorset.
When it comes to flood prevention works carried out by the Environment Agency, they need to assess the bang they get for each buck per head of the population.
£500k spent on a scheme that benefits 200k people meets the funding test but a (just as much needed) £500k scheme that benefits 1,000 people does not, simply because rural populations are smaller.
If everyone is paying their taxes, there is clear merit in ensuring that there are urban hurdles for proposals to overcome and there are rural hurdles to overcome: they just cannot be the same hurdles.
The Minister replying to the debate told us all that he understood the message.
It wasn’t just the Three Dorset Musketeers making the case but every rural MP who spoke. . There was no doubting the passion and commitment we all felt on these important issues. The Prime Minister, representing a rural seat in North Yorkshire, gets it too.
The message has been delivered.
Pressure will be maintained. Watch this space.