Debate on the Address

I cannot resist commenting that of course we in Cumbria would like some of the benefits that the people of Scotland get from their Parliament. My constituents say, ““We are paying for them. Why are they getting 25 per cent more spent on their roads, their houses and their education?”” My rural agricultural constituents beg for the Scotland Executive’s Agriculture Department to run their payments rather than DEFRA. I am not going to go down that route, except to say in all seriousness that I have the benefit of living in an area served by Border television, which serves south Scotland and the north of England. It is a superb cross-border facility that would never be invented these days—for nationalistic reasons north and south of the border, a mixture of Scottish and English television would never be created—but it works. We have a proud 600-year history in the borders; in Dumfries and Galloway, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland and Cumbria. If we had invented a borders economic development region 30 years ago, it might have been successful and improved relations between the Grahams and the other clans in the borders. I shall get back to the main subject before I am led down a further ethnic route. I want to make a final point about rural areas. I served on a Committee that dealt with the Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Bill in 2005. When will the Government get away from their obsession with wind farms? With declining agriculture, this country has tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of acres of land where docks, weeds and thistles grow at the moment. We should be growing fuels for biodiesel on that land. Biodiesel is the future and yet the Government are trying to inflict massive wind farms on the Lake district, placing a steel noose around England’s finest national park. Yes, we want renewables; yes, we will have to go down the nuclear route and we must do more to save and conserve energy. But land-based wind farms that destroy our finest landscapes are not acceptable. We could take some hydropower, of which Scotland has the great benefit, but biofuels are the future for renewables, not land-based wind farms that destroy jobs and landscapes and only let some companies make a few grubby pounds. The final point on rural areas is about milk. I am deeply concerned, as are many others in this House, about the decline of the British dairy farming industry. It is not just men and women with 50 to 100 cows who are going out of business. When huge and efficient dairy farms with 300 or 400 cows are going out of business because it is uneconomical, that is a serious threat to this country and a serious warning that we must take on board. I make no apology for once again attacking the big supermarkets and I pay tribute to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, which has identified the missing 18p. Our farmers are paid 14p or 15p a litre; the supermarkets are all, by happy coincidence, selling at 54p or 55p each. However, there is not a cartel, say our regulators; they cannot prove it. But where is the money in between going? We must look at the power of the supermarkets relating to milk. We must encourage milk farmer and producer co-ops with more muscle, selling directly to the supermarket. The penultimate point I wish to make is on Farepak. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for South Swindon (Anne Snelgrove) for her excellent debate in Westminster Hall last week. Nothing, apart from the way in which DEFRA handled foot and mouth, has angered me more than Farepak’s treatment of its customers. As I get letter after letter from constituents describing their plight, I am getting very angry about it indeed. It is despicable. The hon. Member for South Swindon named the Farepak directors. She was right to do so, because their behaviour has been tantamount to that of the scum of the earth. The situation might be worse, however, because Farepak’s holding company, European Home Retail, has, it seems to me, been guilty of money laundering—if not in the technical sense, certainly in the moral sense. It knew for some time that its investments were duff. It bought a company for £35 million, which did not prosper, and sold it for £4 million, and I understand that it has been raiding the Farepak account. That is money laundering. It siphoned money out of Farepak, which was an okay company that was not going broke or bust. If I could find the names of European Home Retail’s directors, I would name them, too. But if we publish on the internet their other subsidiary companies, I hope that no one will do business with them ever again.