Nanny in trousers

Spectator, The, May 18, 2002 by Aslet, Clive

Yes, that's right, the decision on where to build the millions of new homes that are needed in southern England now lies with Mr Transparency himself, Stephen Byers. Ask yourself if it is more or less likely that he will sacrifice swathes of green and pleasant fields now that Environment comes under a different department from his own. Insiders tell me that the input that Mrs Beckett's department had into the new planning Green Paper was a two-hour meeting between Michael Meacher and Lord Falconer. `You have to have boundaries,' says Mrs Beckett. The line has always got to be drawn somewhere. There might be an argument for including everything in Defra.' There might, indeed, Mrs Beckett, and I wouldn't put it past you to make it. It is said that she refused to take the job at Environment because it was too small.

To someone of Mrs Beckett's temperament, it must be far more congenial to negotiate through the night on the intricacies of climate change than to face down a room filled with angry farmers. That task is left to the hapless Lord Whitty, rapidly becoming known as Dormouse because of his propensity to fall asleep on farm outings. There is no fun to be had in agriculture for this government. Already Mrs Beckett is under attack for not having done more to implement the vision of Sir Donald Curry's report into the future of farming, pubfished in January. This is not wholly fair, because we will only know whether the Chancellor is prepared to fund it - to the relatively modest tune of L500 million - at the end of this summer's spending review. Miracles do happen, but this one is not expected. Meanwhile, Mrs Beckett's emphasis on what the industry can do to help itself fills one with foreboding. The industry, in the form of supermarkets, has been the problem.

Before Labour came to power, the Prime Minister talked sweepingly about reforming the Common Agricultural Policy. As Mrs Beckett admits, `Reform has been discussed all my political life.' Now she believes that something could - in fact, must - actually happen over the next nine months. Everyone is `fed up' with CAP. Apart from anything else, Europe must get its act together on subsidies before the start of the Doha round of World Trade negotiations in Qatar, starting in spring/summer 2003. 'I was involved in the discussions at the time of the Uruguay round. The EU lost out by not focusing on its negotiating mandate, but saying that we don't want to change.' This time, if Mrs Beckett has her way, Europe will have resolved its position before the talking begins.

There is a moral pressure for Europe to open its market in agriculture. `While the developed world contributes $60 billion in direct overseas aid,' Mrs Beckett notes, `we spent $350 billion on agricultural subsidies.' It would please the Americans if the developing countries were able to export their way out of poverty. The commodity that they have to export is food. This might seem to make it a bad time to load our farmers with regulations such as the Vibration Directive, which prevents them from driving tractors for more than three hours a day. Mrs Beckett assures me that the directive will be implemented in such a way that farming operations are not affected - I wonder how.