By Bev Haigh-Jones
At our last committee meeting, we were really pleased to be joined by Ian Flindall, Green Party PPC for St Ives constituency. Ian farms in the far west of the region and we had a really interesting discussion on issues facing the farming community and the environment in our area.
Some of you may already know Ian, as he can often be found manning a stall on some of Cornwall’s farmers’ markets. However, he also cares passionately about animal welfare, biodiversity and renewable energy, believing that we have to work towards a more sustainable environment.
Ian is, of course, busy campaigning in his constituency and building his supporter and canvassing team. If you would like to know more about Ian, other Green Party candidates, or the Cornwall Green Party in general, you can find more here.
Ian Flindall – Good evening! For me, leaving the EU was the worst decision that we could have made and it was an absolute disaster. I’m not super familiar with the workings of the EU, and I’m not super familiar with the voluminous pages of the Green Party policy on this, but I do believe that we’re the only party actively working to rejoin. It’s particularly unfair to the younger generation, of course. We’ve been denied easy travel across Europe, denied study opportunities, and of course we all suffer from the lack of easy trade. And the people in Europe must be laughing, because our competition for their trade has gone and it’s a big market. Instead, we now queue at passport control, we see lorries backed up trying to deal with increasing red tape, and there’s increasing mistrust between leaders in the UK and the EU, which is a dangerous thing.
Greens have always seen the benefit of working together on any particular topic and those challenges are not lessening. Of course we’ve got the need to reduce carbon emissions, environmental standards, safety standards, common targets, social well-being and economic stability – these are all things that are much better done working with your closest partners and your nearest neighbours. I remember once at a training session that I had where I used to work, we were like a classroom and we were asked to either join a group to deal with a particular task, or to work individually. We were given the task and some were in groups and some decided that they would be prima donnas and work on their own. Needless to say, whatever tasks you give people, groups almost always come up with better answers than individuals on their own. It’s a misconception to think that we were ever going to leave the EU and suddenly find Nirvana out there.
The Green Party has always maintained a strong commitment to European collaboration, and the principles of the European Union. There are some keys facts that I’ll give you:
- The Green Party is part of the European Green Party, so we’re already part of a trans-European organisation, emphasising international collaboration with neighbouring countries.
- We respect the founding principles of the post-war institutions that have fostered peace, dialogue and unity across Europe.
- The Party’s place in these institutions is seen as essential for the Green agenda, both domestically and globally, because you can’t do one without the other.
- There’s a global responsibility. Greens believe that issues of social justice, human rights, environmental responsibility and equality, extend beyond international borders. It’s foolish to think that we can do these things independently.
- Collaborative institutions such as the EU play a crucial role in addressing global, and regional challenges, so it’s our goal to regain UK membership and influence within these institutions.
- The Greens appreciated the positive impact that the EU has had, on environmental protection in particular.
- We advocate for trade regulations that prioritise social and ecological well-being, local resilience and human rights, but we would also like to limit the influence of vested interests in the fossil fuel lobbies, of course.
- While acknowledging that the EU has imperfections, the Green Party recognises that the European Parliament often has a more demographic structure than the UK’s Westminster parliament.
- We celebrate the role of EU institutions in advancing green goals across aspects of life in the UK and in neighbouring countries.
- The Green Party maintains that membership of the EU remains the best option for the UK and we think we should rejoin as soon as possible. We can talk about the situation being favourable and the right terms, of course, but that’s a given.
In summary, the Green Party values the EU’s contribution to peace, justice and environmental protection, and we continue to advocate for a closer relationship with Europe. This is no better highlighted than with the war in Ukraine, which has thrown into sharp focus the need for a unified effort towards food security, energy security and defence in particular, and this is going to become a real issue shortly, if it isn’t already.
So, there we are, that’s me! I think we are the only party avidly seeking to rejoining the EU, so I am looking forward to 48% of the vote.
Chair – Thank you, Ian. Does anyone have any questions.
SM – I think that I would just like to express the fact that I think I love everything that the Greens offer, but the one thing that is so difficult, is just because we haven’t got PR, it’s that feeling that –especially with this bunch that are in power – it’s just getting them out. It’s frustrating, really.
Ian Flindall – Can I say two things – or maybe three? Parties will be represented in this election that have never been there before, and some of them are going to take a lot of votes from the Tories. Although first-past-the-post is a pretty negative thing most of the time, when there’s two, three, or four parties, but when there’s six, it becomes a different thing, and if those six are more evenly spread in terms of votes, logic tells us that with our 20% that we ought to be getting there’s a much better chance of being elected. It’s not perfect, but don’t be surprised if things are very different than they have been in the past. I also feel that if the country is going to re-elect the Conservative Party, if it’s going to be that close that they need your vote, then we might as well go and plant potatoes and forget it. I just can’t believe that we are going to do it and there’s going to be enough people voting other than Tory that we don’t need the Green vote diluted. Individual Green votes actually mean a lot more, it seems to me, than other votes for other parties. A strong Green vote is a very powerful thing, regardless of winning, and I don’t think that any of the other parties would have any green policies at all if they didn’t think that the Greens were at their heels. We’re only at their heels because some people vote for us.
AH – Of course, we have the local elections tomorrow, and my recollection is that last year the Greens did better than expected in the local elections. Is that right?
Ian Flindall – Better than other people expected, yes. I wasn’t surprised at all, and I think the same could happen tomorrow. I’ve stood in a few elections and usually with the understanding that I was never going to win, but it was still worth standing. It’s much more open this time in St Ives, and it’s going to be interesting.
TS – I was looking at some of the early history of the Labour Party recently and back in 1914, Labour had 420 elected councillors and ten years later they formed the first Labour government. The Green Party currently has getting on for 800 councillors, so they are making quite a lot of progress.
Ian Flindall – Yes, the tussle with the Liberal Democrats is always the thing, but we’ll see.
AH – Can I ask you a question about how farmers are managing with the changes from the EU Common Agricultural Policy, to what DEFRA is offering them, because from my reading of it there’s quite a lot of confusion about what farmers are entitled to and when they will get it.
Ian Flindall – We’ve moved away from a situation where you got paid per acre, with some caveats in terms of how you manage the land in terms of the environment. There are some things called cross-compliance issues where you could take the basic payments, as long as you didn’t pollute the water, you looked after your hedges, and then you could enter European type environmental agreements, specifically aimed at particular habitats, or flora and fauna. We’ve got one here that’s still active where we’re looking after the cliff on behalf of the chough. It’s complicated, but we have to graze some animals on the cliff so that they put dung on the ground, beetles lay their eggs in the dung and then the chough have something to eat. I think that you have probably heard that the chough have now proliferated because of this agreement that a number of farmers got into.
That was under EU auspices, but now they’re tailing off those agreements – the basic payment scheme that the EU had – and in turn, they’ve focused almost entirely on environmental incentives. So, gone is the per area payment, and now you can only benefit from subsidies by entering into countryside stewardship arrangements, or something called sustainable farming incentives, the environmental land management schemes, where you are required to work with other farmers in your area.
So already this sounds complex, doesn’t it? To give you an example of the confusion, one of the things that you can get into is planting wildflower meadows for birds. So there we are, there’s a line there that says you can apply for planting wildflower seeds and get paid a certain amount per hectare. Then a couple of farmers said, “Well, that’s more than I earn for doing anything else on the farm, I’ll put my whole farm into wildflowers”, and suddenly DEFRA realised that actually, the agreements they were offering could do away with food production altogether.
So there we are at the moment, there’s lots of chopping and changing. Instead of highly efficient grass growing, we’re encouraged to have mixed grass “lays”, as they call them – so less efficient in terms of the food production for the animals, but they do provide a wider diversity on the land. There’s all sorts of payments that we can apply for – looking after traditional buildings, or restoring Cornish hedges – and that’s actually a very good thing, because Cornish hedges are massively important for wildlife, lizards and slow worms and all sorts of things, but – they have forgotten about food, basically! For the moment anyway, but hopefully that’s going to change.
The buzzword now is “regenerative” farming – it was rewilding – but that’s gone now and we call it regenerative farming, which is a good term, as long as we understand it. I come to this with some interest because I came to farming rather late, and I’m interested in that whole idea, but think about the poor traditional farmer, they only know how to grow cows, or potatoes, or daffodils and they don’t know too much about this wildlife diversity stuff. They’ve always looked after what they’ve got, but they’ve always been encouraged to be efficient with their food production, and that’s what they know, but they’re being paid less and less for their food production, so loads of people are going out of business, especially small farms, and Cornwall has nothing but small farms and if you ask around, you’ll find that most of the existing farms don’t have a succession plan with their family, they’re going out of business and will be capitalising on it.
AH – There’s an example with my next door neighbours. They’re third or fourth generation farmers – in a small way with cattle and they had a milk round and suchlike – and this generation there are two girls and one boy (I say girls and boy, but they’re in their sixties), he’s the only one still left, and actually he’s not farming, he has an agricultural machinery business. So it was a farm, producing food, and it’s gone.
Ian Flindall – Yeah, if you’ve got a few acres you can think about a wind turbine, maybe, if you’re in the right sort of area, you can think about visitor centres or other things for our visitors, but the last thing that you would consider of you were a proper businessman would be farming, because it’s the one that pays the least. I blame supermarkets, of course, because they have made us think that cheap food is a good thing, and it isn’t. It isn’t because you don’t know where it’s coming from, you don’t know how it’s been reared, you don’t know it’s been raised or what damage has been done and other continents provide us with the food because it’s cheap. When you include all the costs associated with that cheapness, maybe it’s not that cheap after all.
EB – What’s your knowledge about what’s happened to the farming industry, especially in Cornwall, in regards to getting EU workers in peak harvesting seasons. How’s that gone?
Ian Flindall – There was one season when a lot of produce was turned back into the ground, and that’s just a total loss. We don’t employ seasonal workers, but I think things must have eased, because I think there’s a special arrangement now for seasonal workers from abroad, because I do see them out there picking daffodils, etc., as they were, so it must have eased.
EB – Do they still come from the EU, do you think?
Ian Flindall – I can’t give a definitive answer on that I’m afraid, I don’t know, though I’m sure some do, but it’s not as easy as it was. Another thing you might also want to think about is when you see tractors going down the A30, they’re going between what used to be farms, where the land now is out to contract. So they’re not really farmers, they’re contract workers. The contract workers are picking produce on a contract basis, and the workers that come in to help them are on a contract basis. The idea that it’s a family farm with all that production is not so much there as it was, and there would be no need to put your tractor on the main road normally, but we see it all the time.
AH – That has gone on for a long time, though. Going back to my neighbour again, twenty-five years ago as well as having the farm, he was contracting, and one day he came back after planting 100,000 cabbage plants.
Ian Flindall – Well that’s what you call efficiency, because he’s using machinery to go and plant in an area that’s not his farm. But by the same token, the people that used to farm that land are no longer there. The thing that I have learned about Cornwall – because I’m not actually from Cornwall – is that’s it’s a fantastic place for a mosaic of small farms that maintain the countryside that everybody likes. With some of the small farms and the small communities being lost, that actual countryside could also easily be lost, because you can only look after it like that if it’s close to you and you care about it. If, on the other hand, you don’t care about soil fertility and soil health and you’re just prepared to put chemicals into the sand to feed the plants, then economically it sort of works, but over time it’s a huge degradation.
I don’t mean to depress you, there are good things happening. I can tell you that here we’re working with open farms, we have what’s called the “Carn to cliff wildlife corridor”, so there’s a connection now between the moors and the cliffs, where we are. The cliffs are interesting anyway because there is masses of land there that nobody goes to, because they can’t as it’s too dangerous, but it’s where all the wildlife is, and we’ve helped create that connection.
TS – Could I ask, Ian, are you worried about the UK doing trade deals with Brazil, or the US, or other parts of the world?
Ian Flindall – That’s a huge question, because in Green terms, sustainability terms, why are we trying to deal with somewhere the other side of the globe? Isn’t that unsustainable before you start? And of course, the laws of comparative advantage apply – if you can ship it here and deliver it to the shop cheaper than it can be produced here, what’s to stop you doing it? But, in being allowed to do that, you’re simply degrading what’s here and taking the value and the soul out of our country.
TS – I’m not sure what the status is, but the EU was contemplating a sort of free trade deal with Brazil, but I think it may all be called off now for various reasons, but I’m not too sure.
Ian Flindall – Brazil needs to pull its own socks up and start looking after its own biodiversity, and that ought to be a precondition of us actually doing any trade deal. I think the EU has moved towards considering what sustainability might mean and what sort of incentives could be put in place to enhance that. That’s just another reason why we should be working with the European countries, but also influencing them to move in that direction in terms of what is sustainability.
TS – I guess if you’re part of a much larger trading bloc like the EU then you have much more influence in the type of deals that you’re able to do, rather than just a small country like Britain.
Ian Flindall – We’re likely to get into desperate deals just to maintain face. Farmers are not very happy about the New Zealand and Australia deals, because, like it or not, we can’t compete with prairie farming in terms of beef and lamb and dairy production. They just set their animals free then go and round them up later as there are thousands of acres on every farm. It’s a different form altogether. Of course, they don’t have a high population so they need to export it and they’re going to export it cheap, aren’t they? We can produce all those things perfectly adequately here, but people working every hour that is sent to them need a decent return.
AH – Then, of course, they flood our market with cheap produce and put our farmers out of business, and then they put the prices up.
Ian Flindall – They do it to customers all the time! You walk in a shop and find the milk is cheap, but other things aren’t because they’ve swapped the prices, and the next week the milk is a higher price and the bread is cheap. It’s appalling.
BH – There are also the animal welfare issues related to the animals from overseas though, aren’t there – apart from the carbon footprint – it’s totally illogical when we can do it on our doorstep, that we are even contemplating it, I think.
Ian Flindall – Farmers have been their own worst enemies in many ways, though. They’re not very good at working together, but I think that they’re waking up to the problems now.
RK – Lovely as fields full of wildflowers are, how scared are you about the possibility of food scarcity due to food chains and, if they ever do come in, the new checks on the borders when food comes in from elsewhere? It seems to me, looking at it from here – I’m lucky enough to live in Germany, so I’m looking at it from the outside – but it seems to me that if food production is going in the UK you’re relying on getting food from elsewhere, and heavens knows what will happen if that gets cut off.
Ian Flindall – That’s exactly the conundrum. At the moment we import at least 40% of our food, and yet we are told that we need to turn at least 30% of our land over to other than agricultural production. So there’s a mismatch, and there are those who think we should produce fewer animals because that way we could produce more vegetables. In this part of Cornwall I don’t really hold with that because the weather isn’t really suited to producing much other than livestock, and we try to make the most of the grass that does grow in all weathers. It is a conundrum, though what we’re really saying is “Are there too many people to feed?”. But I don’t really want to go down that avenue.
We have to develop processes of mixed farming – I think it’s now generally being understood – we need to go to mixed farming again, as used to happen in the past where you’d have some animals and some vegetable production. Then the waste, or manure from the one would feed the other and it becomes more of a circular process. Those are skills from our forefathers that we’ve lost to a great degree. So we do need to go back to that mixed, regenerative farming, growing healthy food, close to where people are consuming it. And people can do a lot to support this. They need to go out and find where farmers are producing in a way that they can consume, instead of just going down to the supermarket. Farm shops are becoming more of a thing, you can buy from local producers. It’s always going to be dearer, but that will encourage a more diverse local economy – and that 40% that’s missing, we need to look at very carefully. All the food we demand, is it being consumed, or is it being wasted? A lot of people, probably myself included, buy more food than we ever need. We definitely need to look at the 60/40% split and ask ourselves, do we need to import that 40%, or are there ways of replacing it? I think there are, but we need to change the way in which we buy and sell food.
TS – I will just put in a plug here for Ian’s stall on the farmers’ market in Truro every Saturday – highly recommended.
AH – Have you been at Falmouth as well?
Ian Flindall – Yes, though we aren’t actually doing the Truro market at the moment. We are currently doing the St Erth market on Saturday, Falmouth on Tuesday morning on the Moor, and we are in Hayle on Thursdays. We also love to see people at the farm any time – it’s Chypraze in Morvah.
BH – Can I just ask one thing before you go, Ian? Going off the farming topic, I assume that if you’re not already, you will soon be out campaigning, certainly once we have an election date. Can I ask whether you’ve got a main focus, or whether you’re reacting to what you hear on the doorstep? In other words whether you are opening with a specific topic, or whether you’re reacting to what people say?
Ian Flindall – I do think Europe is one focus, definitely. It’s a unique selling point for the Greens, is it not? I think if the past is anything to go by, the other parties will realise what we’re talking about and they’ll try to grab it again, but for the moment, that’s a unique selling point.
Personally, I think we ought to be doing more for Ukraine, because if we don’t, we’ll be facing Putin ourselves. Plus locally, the farming issue is a big one – there’s a lot of anxiety about the way conservation measures are being taken, which is a shame, because farmers on the whole are supportive of conservation issues.
I should tell you, though, that doorstepping isn’t my favourite occupation, but I have started collecting names and the first step is to find the 964 people who voted for me last time. I’ve got quite a list already, and what I’m saying to people is, it’s up to you, please, find a few more people, tell me about them if you can, and I’ll communicate with them. With social media these days, and I don’t mean Facebook because I don’t really like politicking on Facebook, but I do like WhatsApp, I do like messaging and I do like keeping in contact, and those things give us a means to get some momentum. So that’s what I’m working on at the moment, and I’m on 150 at the minute. So if each of those finds a hundred more – that’s my hope.
This was a really interesting and enlightening chat with Ian, highlighting some of the issues being faced by our farmers, as well as updating us on environmental and conservation changes, and we are grateful that he took the time to talk to us.
We are hoping to continue with this series of Q&As, so if you have someone that you would like us to approach with an invitation – perhaps a PPC in your constituency – do please let us know and we will see what we can do. You can contact us here.
