How right Michael Gove was, in his first speech as Environment Secretary, to promise to put an end to a Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) which ‘puts resources in the hands of the already-wealthy’. But how bizarre that he then proposed a reform that will continue to do just that.
Doing away with CAP ought to be one of the big gains from Brexit. For the past 44 years, taxpayers have been forced to fund a system which, in turn, has created food mountains, degraded the landscape, put millions in the pockets of wealthy landowners in return for doing virtually nothing and, in conjunction with protectionist tariffs from food imports from outside the EU, driven the price of food higher than it need be.
Until 2003 CAP was based around straightforward production subsidies, encouraging food to be produced that the market didn’t actually want – hence the butter mountain and wine lake.
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