Article
Comment
Eating
General Election 24
5 min read

Give us each day our daily bread

Why the political parties cannot understand farming.

James is a writer of sit coms for BBC TV and Radio.

A man stands looking baleful next to a row of red tractors
Jeremy Clarkson re-considering the farming life.
Amazon Studios.

Go to the Labour Party’s ten election pledges. Search for the word ‘farm’. I’ll wait. 

You’re not going to do that, are you? Fair enough. Let me tell you happens when you do. Nothing. You won’t find the word ‘farm’. That absence is revealing. 

Or is it? Am I just being parochial? I’m not a farmer, but the son of a farmer and raised on a dairy farm in Somerset. It was a relief to my parents that I didn’t want to follow them – and every other Cary throughout history – into the family business, as the good years were clearly coming to an end. My parents sold their herd of cows a few years before Mad Cow Disease. They bought sheep for a variety of slightly perverse incentives. After a few years they discovered sheep are the worst, since they find all kinds of imaginative ways to die. The only bit of luck they had on the sheep was selling them before the Foot and Mouth epidemic hit. 

Farmers in the UK have gotten used to being ignored by politicians, even though 70 per cent of the UK’s land is farmed. So what’s the plan for how over two-thirds of the country is going to be managed, given that Labour are certain to win? It’s hard to tell. 

I found a more detailed manifesto on the Labour Party website, based around five Labour policies called ‘Let’s get Britain’s future back’. Idiotic nonsensical slogans notwithstanding, I did find one mention of the word ‘farm’. But only once. And it was part of the word ‘windfarm’. Labour is more interested in the farming of wind than the farming of wheat, cattle or vegetables. That managed air might explain where their slogan came from. 

It is no wonder that the rural communities don’t trust Labour. According to FarmersGuide.co.uk, only 28 per cent said “they believe Labour understands and respects rural communities and the rural way of life”. But it’s not all bad news for Labour. The Tories are trusted even less, having dropped down to only 25 per cent. In short, the people in the countryside have no confidence in politicians. 

The reason agricultural policy gets so complicated is because we have a great deal of knowledge but no wisdom.

You need only to watch Clarkson’s Farm to understand why this is the case. Farmers have been subject to an enraging mixture of overregulation and political indifference. Some of this has been Brexit. Some has been bureaucratic incompetence. 

But there is another more fundamental problem. I discovered it when reading The National Food Strategy. This was a document courageously commissioned by the Conservatives in the hope that someone else would come up with some coherent policies for the countryside. It runs for hundreds of pages plus footnotes and sources and is an impressive piece of work. It pulls together issues around land use, food security, climate change, food inequality and obesity. 

These issues are all interconnected. In fact, they are interdependent. How can they not be? You have to consider them all together. But once you open these cans of worms you end up with all kinds of other questions about pesticides, genetic modification, food waste and the identity of the maniac canning worms in the first place. 

The reason agricultural policy gets so complicated is because we have a great deal of knowledge but no wisdom. We understand crops on a molecular level. We can design gigantic machinery to efficiently administer the correct dosage of pesticides to individual plants. We can theorise about animal bedding until the cows come home. But we can’t make decisions. That requires wisdom. 

Wisdom is discernment, choosing between two good things – or making a decision based on the lesser of two evils. We can’t do that, because we can’t decide what is very good, what is good, what is okay and what is evil. Everything is practical pragmatic politics. You do what works. Except how do you define ‘what works’? For whom? Based on what? 

Because we can’t make decisions, we end up having to balance entirely valid concerns about climate, obesity, food inequality, subsidies and the life cycles of bees. But we can’t do it. It’s too complicated. It produces anomalies and perverse incentives. The result is middle-aged men taking their own lives because TB-ridden badgers have ended up with more legal protections than tenant farmers. 

We would do well to look to our ancestors. They lacked our granular knowledge but they had wisdom which, according to the Bible, begins with ‘the fear of the Lord’. They ploughed the fields and scattered the good seed on the land. They understood that our food doesn’t come from our brains, our labs, our factories or our highly integrated just-in-time delivery systems. Our food comes from God. As the Psalmist writes: 

He makes grass grow for the cattle, 
     and plants for people to cultivate— 
     bringing forth food from the earth: 
wine that gladdens human hearts, 
     oil to make their faces shine, 
     and bread that sustains their hearts. 

Psalm 104

That’s why our predecessors ask for God’s blessing on their tools on Plough Monday in early January. It explains ‘Rogation days’ in the spring when the entire congregation would wander round the fields asking for God’s blessing. There was Lammastide when the harvest was beginning to ripen in early August. And every Sunday, the congregations prayed this central line of the Lord’s prayer: ‘Give us this day our daily bread’. 

Jesus was good at bread. He was so good, he didn’t even need wheat to make it. He could feed five thousand families from a handful of loaves. It’s interesting that avowedly atheist regimes – like Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China – end up with mass starvation. 

Our own society has turned its back on God. We have made ourselves gods. And after much consultation and two hundred pages of background and policy – plus foot notes - it turns out that food is a lot harder than we thought. Omniscience and omnipotence are really handy which it comes to a coherent plan for 70 per cent of the land in the UK. Rather than another National Food Strategy, let’s just have Psalm 104. Right now, our farmers are prepared to try anything. 

Article
Comment
Romance
5 min read

Getting hitched should benefit more than the advantaged

Marriage’s decline impacts outcomes for all.
A bride dressed colourfully stands next to her groom, dressed similarly, as he sits in a wheelchair.
Ellie Cooper on Unsplash.

Of all the dramatic changes to Britain in the last half century, one of the least discussed is the extraordinary decline in marriage.  

The marriage rate has fallen by two-thirds in the last 50 years. It was just above six per cent in 1972 and has now been under two per cent since 2017. 

This remarkable decline has corresponded with a rise in a relatively new relation type: cohabitation. Cohabitation was extremely uncommon before the 1960s, and even by 1986 just 10 per cent of new mothers were cohabitants. It is, however, rapidly becoming the mainstream. Now 35 per cent of babies are born to cohabiting mothers, and the total number of UK cohabiting couples increased from 1.5 to 3.7 million between 1996 and 2022.  

Much of this is due to couples delaying marriage: 84 per cent of religious and 91 per cent of civil marriages are now between couples that already live together, and the average age when first marrying has climbed by 10 years since the early 1970s. But it is also due to many more couples not marrying at all. 

Opinions understandably differ on this social transition away from marriage and towards cohabitation. It is a point of progress worth celebrating that the previous societal shunning of those, especially women, who had children outside of marriage has been left in the past. However, such progress has not been without consequences. Cohabitations are less stable, on average, than marriages. Cohabiting parents are around three times as likely to separate in the first five years of their children’s life as married couples.  

This stability is not simply because wealthier, more highly educated people tend to have stable families and also tend to marry. Studies by World Family Maps and the Marriage Foundation have shown marriage to be a larger factor in family stability than either education or income.  

Nor does the stability come from couples staying together miserably.  Studies undertaken in 2017 and 2024 looked at the outcomes of couples 10 years on from considering their relationships to be ‘on the brink’. In the initial study, while 70 per cent of cohabiting couples had separated in the decade since considering themselves ‘on the brink’, 70 per cent of the married couples had remained together. Perhaps even more crucially, just seven per cent of those married couples that had stayed together were unhappy in their relationship a decade on. The 2024 study found none of the sample of married couples that had stayed together were still unhappy 10 years on. For those that had stayed together, things had improved. 

This family instability that the decline of marriage has caused is also unevenly distributed. Affluent couples – often those most likely to criticise the concept of marriage – are much more likely to marry than disadvantaged ones.  

Looking at socioeconomic groups, seven in ten mothers from the most advantaged group are married, while just a third of those from the two most disadvantaged groups are. The effect is geographic, too. Institute for Fiscal Studies research has found parents having children are more likely to be married if they are living in better educated areas. For the advantaged, it is compassionately affirmational to suggest that every relationship is equal, even though the advantaged themselves choose the most secure option of marriage: a hypocrisy only tolerated due to the potent fear of seeming judgemental. 

The consequence of this is deepening inequality: disadvantaged families are rendered more likely to breakdown, while children from affluent backgrounds are disproportionately likely to enjoy the ‘the two-parent privilege’, the substantial emotional and developmental advantages of growing up in a stable home. Melissa Kearney coined the phrase, and her evidence shows how children grow up, on average, to have better educational outcomes, better emotional and physical wellbeing, and higher incomes if they are raised in two-parent homes. 

Stable families are foundational to a stable society, and marriage is crucial to stable families.

So, why are marriage rates so much higher among wealthier couples than poorer ones, and why is this gap growing? 

We can isolate three reasons in particular, each more solvable than the last.  

Most challenging is the feedback loop effect: people whose parents, role-models, and friends have not married are unlikely to do so themselves. The demographic trend compounds itself.  

Second, and easily addressable if only the will was there, is the public messaging effect: politicians – and to some extent celebrities – have consistently told the public that marriage is unimportant. In 2017, Marriage Foundation research found that it had been a decade since a cabinet member had discussed marriage in a speech. This has hardly changed in the years since. In 2024, the only major party whose manifesto even mentioned marriage was Reform; even then the focus in the relevant section seemed to be less on marriage and more on getting ‘people trapped on benefits back into the workplace’. 

Third is the cost of weddings. A quick flick through top wedding magazines suggests that the average wedding costs upwards of £20,000. Survey evidence from both Marriage Foundation and the Thriving Center of Psychology have found that most young people view weddings as unrealistically expensive. 

This financial problem is solvable: much of the costs relate to venue hire. Unless they are having a religious marriage, a couple will need to find a venue that has gone through the bureaucratic process of becoming an ‘approved premises’. The cheapest of these are register offices which, including all expenses, still cost about £500. 

This is eminently mendable. The Law Commission proposal to reorganise wedding law around the officiant, not the venue, opens the door for a future of more affordable weddings by removing the regulatory barrier. It will also bring the law in line with that of other home nations. 

This proposal will not work by itself, though, it will need to be supported by creativity in wedding planning.  

Wedding costs can be substantially reduced by taking a DIY approach. Food, drinks, and decorations can often be coordinated amongst enthusiastic (and appropriately competent!) guests.  

Booze free weddings are a growing phenomenon, and especially good for weddings with children.  

Such ‘group-effort’ approaches often have a unique feel thanks to the high participation of guests, and people are more likely to remember events that they feel a sense of ownership of, having helped make them happen. 

Alongside this is a recommendation by the Centre for Social Justice. It proposes subsidising the necessary statutory fees for the poorest couples, up to £550 per couple. An inexpensive and hugely beneficial adjustment to improve wedding accessibility for the least fortunate.  

Stable families are foundational to a stable society, and marriage is crucial to stable families; perhaps it is time for all of us to make tying the knot easier.  

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