Required viewing for all MPs

It’s a pity that the elections yesterday coincided with Molly Dineen’s documentary ‘The Lie of the Land’ because I imagine that the minister of agriculture (or minister of Naff, Maff, Defra or whatever it’s called now) was too busy with politics to be watching Channel 4 last night. Shame. The film looked at a way of life — farming — that is facing extinction. ‘They [the government] want the land as a playground for people in the towns,’ said one Cornish farmer. We have become ‘unreal about animals…treating meat as something that comes in cellophane’, as another put it. We spent a third of our income on food in the Seventies; now it’s 8 to 9 per cent. Farmers are forced to kill perfectly healthy animals because it isn’t economical to keep them — and ‘we weren’t brought up to shoot healthy animals’. The documentary should be required viewing for all MPs.