Boris’s rewilding obsession could backfire

Does Boris Johnson have the faintest idea what he and his government are trying to achieve anymore? I ask because of the Prime Minister’s ‘grow for Britain’ strategy which has been leaked to the Daily Telegraph. The strategy, due to be launched on Monday, apparently demands that farmers grow more fruit and vegetables to make us less reliant on imported food, especially in the face of the Ukraine crisis – which has created the headache of how to continue production and exports from one of Europe’s most agricultural nations.

To this end, the grow for Britain strategy will, it is said, commit to ‘changes to planning rules to make it easier to convert land into farms’. There may be a few marginal areas in national parks and sites of special scientific interest which farmers would like to plough up but are prevented from doing so by environmental, rather than planning, rules.