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This government is presiding over the collapse of British farming. Seventy-nine years ago, in the shadow of the Second World War, the British government passed the Agriculture Act of 1947 with a simple mission – never to let this island nation go hungry again. It enshrined food security as a pillar of national security. The Act was a direct response to the extreme vulnerabilities exposed during the Second World War, when German U-boat blockades nearly starved the nation into submission.

Today, that pledge has been broken and the UK has fallen into its worst food security crisis in decades. Self sufficiency is at 60% by economic value, having fallen 5% in just the last two years. Meaning the UK is growing more dependent on international imports and can only feed itself for about 226 days of the year.

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But that should come as no surprise to anyone. This government has done nothing but destroy farming since it came to office.

One of Labour’s first acts in office was to introduce its Family Farm Tax. In one fell swoop it shattered long-term confidence in the sector; farmers stopped investing in their farms; and tractor and machinery sales plummeted to their lowest levels since the 1940s.

When added to Rachel Reeves’ damaging hikes to Employers’ National Insurance Contributions and the National Living Wage, along with Ed Miliband’s mad net zero and decarbonisation policies, the upshot has been the average farm has lost between 22% and 32% of its income over the last two years leading to the closure of 6,390 agricultural businesses in 2025 alone – the highest annual number since the Office for National Statistics (ONS) began compiling quarterly statistics in 2017. It appears that 2026 will follow the same pattern.

For hard-pressed farmers, it has been one crisis on top of another. Terrible crops due to spring floods and this summer’s drought has taken over £1.35billion from arable incomes in the last two years. But that is not all. The price of tractor diesel has jumped 40% and fertiliser costs have surged due to the ongoing incidents in the straits of Hormuz. Given many have no spare cash in the bank, farmers have been left unable to cope.

Andy Burnham’s recently announced £65million emergency drought package might sound good on a press release, but it is more smoke and mirrors.

This is not new money for farmers, it’s recycled and redirected support which works out at just £650 per farm. You can see it isn’t going to touch the sides for farmers on their knees, and I can only see grocery prices continuing to go up, despite the fact they’ve already jumped 30.1% since 2022. The only thing keeping costs down at the moment are the price wars between supermarkets and food shrinkflation but that can’t last forever.

No nation can consider itself secure if it cannot feed its own people. We must once again treat the British farmer as a frontline defender of national security. We must back British farming before the tractor engines stop for good, and we become a permanent hostage to foreign countries.