I thank the right hon. Member for being a champion in this House of skills and trade unions, which are sadly too rarely championed by Conservative Members. I recognise his points on our common wealth and the work that goes into looking after and protecting our land, but I also recognise the impact of the last Government on land and our farming communities. Let us look at the Conservatives’ record: 14 years of running down the DEFRA budget; a decade of austerity, which became a decade of insecurity; a Brexit turkey half-cooked; flood funding cut; trade deals that sold out British farmers; a farming budget £300 million underspent. If Conservative Members want to discuss food security and the future of our rural communities, bring it on.
The Conservative party saw more than 12,000 farmers and agribusinesses forced out of business since 2010. Farming has the lowest profitability of any sector in the economy. Conservatives abolished the Agricultural Wages Board and saw rural wages stagnate, as did many Liberal Democrat colleagues, who voted in the same Lobby. Now the Conservatives are defending the status quo when it comes to big business, big landowners and rising land prices. At the start of this debate, I thought that they were literally the last people on earth defending the status quo, but some of them seem to be talking about accepting some kind of policy, while those on the Front Bench seem to be saying that there should be no change whatsoever, so the merry-go-round continues.
The Opposition want all the spending but none of the responsibility. We talk about change. We know the change that this country voted for in our rural and farm communities. People voted for change because public services were broken, with rural schools crumbling, NHS waiting lists soaring, and rural GPs and NHS dentists harder to find. The Government are rightly focused on the cost of living crisis and improving access to GPs in our rural communities. What are the Opposition focused on? They are defending a tax break for estates worth up to £3 million while attacking a pay rise for the lowest paid workers in our rural communities. That says everything that we need to know about today’s Tory party.