Red tape has pushed rural businesses into black markets, according to Dom Wightman, creator of Country Squire Magazine.
Speaking to NTD’s “British Thought Leaders” programme, Mr. Wightman said growing bureaucracy is affecting farming as well as other businesses in the countryside.
“Some guy who deals with scrap metal, for example—and nowadays you need to have a licence for every single director within the firm—so if you’re the guy who’s actually going out collecting the scrap metal, you need a licence,” he said.
“But then if your wife or your father or whatever is a director in the company, they also need to pay for a licence.”
Mr. Wightman said there are many farmers on the breadline and bureaucracy such as licenses costs money and time and “eats massively into their margins.”
“So the larger the state gets with these characters—and they tend to be quite independent characters—some of them, they‘ll just say: ’No, I’m my own man. I’m not going to bother with the licence'—you’re then creating this kind of black market in metal scrap metal dealing, or farming, or whatever it might be,” he said.
Mr. Wightman said the state “is just growing and growing and growing,” citing the so-called Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) as an example.
For farmers whose land are in a SSSI, “these bureaucrats who suddenly showed up out of nowhere with their clipboard. They’re having to show them when they’re moving animal feed and animals across this area,” he said. “And when you speak to Natural England, you say, ‘Well, why are you turning this into this SSSI?’ And they say: ‘Well, because it’s so beautiful. This part of England is so stunningly beautiful. And we need to protect it.’
‘Nature’s Brutal’
Speaking of animal rights advocates, Mr. Wightman said: “The town has forgotten that outside city and urban life, you have nature, which is not peace and tranquillity. Nature’s brutal.”“And once you move into the countryside, you understand that,” he said. “You appreciate that there is a need for predation control. You’ve got to cull the badgers, otherwise there’s bovine TB running rampant in cattle; you’ve got to take out the foxes to a degree, otherwise they also run rampant. And you get to appreciate that there’s all kinds of things that need to be done in the countryside that townies just would look at and go, ‘Oh, my God, that’s terrible.’”
On fox hunting he said: “A natural death for an animal is not some kind of anthropomorphized Walt Disney-prismed beautiful death. It’s brutal. If you’re a fox wandering around in a field and you’re ill, you’re going to have a horrible end. So hunting in some ways ... is a civilization of managing predators and turning it—as British do, we always create sport—turning it into a fun enterprise for the village.”
Mr. Wightman said he supports animal welfare because “looking after animals is a noble thing” but it’s “bonkers” to advocate for equal rights between animals and humans.
He said rural voices get ignored by politicians because rural communities are “always a minority” when the country has “a ratio of five to one—five urbanite to one rural” voters.
Groups representing rural areas are “trying to be allied against this shrill voice of environmental activism. But it’s very difficult because five urbanites are listening to the environmental activists and don’t know much about the countryside. It’s very difficult trying to explain to people that it’s cruel to be kind in the countryside,” he said.
“They don’t understand that the wisdom of the countryside needs to be perpetuated. If it doesn’t happen, then their food is threatened.”
He also said companies buying “very good farmland” to plant trees is also creating “a huge problem” for food security.
