Angry farmers offer a theme for the week – starting with the French at close quarters. Leaving the Eurotunnel at Calais en route to a wedding in the Alps, my car party encounters agricultural rage in the form of convoys of stationary trucks at all the port’s major exit points, as tractors blockade the autoroutes and police do nothing to shift them. Echoing recent protests in Germany, Poland and Romania, French farmers want better price protection, cheaper diesel, more import barriers, more aid from Brussels and less green regulation.
We’re lucky not to be sprayed with manure, as was happening elsewhere. The protests have support from the powerful CGT union on the left and Marine Le Pen on the right, the latter calling the Emmanuel Macron regime ‘the farmers’ worst enemies’.What’s most significant is that polls say farmers also have the sympathy of almost 90 per cent of French voters across the political spectrum. But in consumer economies dominated by supermarket buying power and government pursuit of free trade, there is no mechanism, or serious public will, or political incentive, to translate sympathy into higher food prices. So it’s easy to understand why these producers of vital sustenance, whatever the weather, whatever the politics, always feel they come off worse. No wonder they love to enmerder the motorists.
Canadian cousins
Trade talks between the UK and Canada have been suspended because our own farmers object to imports of hormone-treated beef and our Canadian cousins want hefty tariffs on British cheese and cars. Overall numbers are not large: £7.3 billion worth of Canadian goods vs £11.8 billion from the UK; within that total, the controversial cheese counts for less than £20 million.
But it’s obvious in principle that we should seek amicable, free-flowing trade relations with an ally such as Canada whose geopolitical interests and personal ancestries are so close to ours, as I witnessed in Toronto a couple of months ago.
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