agriculture Articles

Last year I devoted one of my regular Labour History articles to opposing the coalition government’s proposal to abolish the Agricultural Wages Board for England and Wales. Set up in 1948 by Labour cabinet minister Tom Williams, the Agricultural Wages Board had sought...

The challenge for farming often gets defined in the ‘here and now’: the dairy crisis of 2012, the continuing impacts of the Somerset floods, last year’s cheap imports of lamb or this year’s beef prices, or just the need to get this season’s crops safely in and put a...

In some ways, Tom Williams was an unlikely hero of British agricultural workers. After all, as a coal miner, he was associated with heavy industry before entering parliament for the Don Valley seat in 1922. As a cabinet minister, however, he made his name at...

Defra ministers talk a good game over food security, and the need to bolster UK farm and food production. Yet at the first critical test of their tenure those same ministers have been found wanting. As the dairy crisis loomed, ministers were asleep on the job. Yet the...