It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts, although I must confess that, with the new technology here, this debate has sometimes felt as though we were participating in “Just a Minute”.
I thank the hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife (Thomas Docherty) and my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) for securing this debate. The enthusiasm of so many Members shows how important the issue is to so many of us and, most importantly, to the farmers in our communities. I welcome
the new Minister, who has probably had to spend a lot of time absorbing all this new information. Hearing us today will, I hope, reinforce how important the issue is to our farmers. I want to put on the record my tribute to my hon. Friend—now my right hon. Friend—the Member for South East Cambridgeshire (Mr Paice) for his tireless work in opposition before he became a Minister, and also as a Minister. He helped many of us and he helped many farmers.
In preparing for this debate, I took a look at that well-known agricultural journal—“Lonely Planet”. Its guide to Cheshire states, obviously authoritatively, that the
“largely agricultural Cheshire is a very black-and-white kind of place—if you focus on the genuine half-timbered Tudor farmhouses and the Friesian cows that graze in the fields around them.”
Cheshire is great dairy country. We have heard about other counties, but Cheshire is supreme as far as I am concerned. [Interruption.] Did my hon. Friend say Cheshire?