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European Union (Amendment) Bill

The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, challenged the Conservative Party—and others, presumably—to say whether it wants a free market in agricultural products. I think that New Zealand went for a free market in agricultural products and made a great success of it. It may very well be that that is another policy that the Conservative Party will put forward before an election before the Labour Party gets hold of it. As I shall show in a moment when I quote further from today’s report in the Financial Times, the Government seem to be moving in a direction that many of us over many years have urged them to do, although so far they have not gone our way. The CAP has undoubtedly been a disaster overall. I remember when we were fighting those battles long ago about whether we should join the Common Market that the people who were most in favour of our joining were the farmers. They were in the vanguard. The NFU was a government supporter and helped the Government to persuade farmers, who were much more important then in our economy than they are now, that they should go in. By heaven, a lot of them now regret that decision, because since we joined the common agricultural policy about 500,000 farmers have left the farms and our agricultural production is not what it was. It has been a disaster in other ways as well. The Treasury tells us that the CAP costs every family in this country £18 a week more in food costs than they would need to spend if we were not in the CAP.