ornithological subsidies

[james armstrong]

   Extend CAP payments to
house-holders for feeding garden birds!  

Compare Common Agricultural Policy payments with the Corn Laws of 1678.

“ The corn laws were altered step by step to leave the
supplying of the consumer to look after itself and to protect the  producer and the trader. …In 1678 the
experiment of a bounty to exporters was tried. .. made permanent in 1689.   Altogether £6,000,000 was paid  in bounty in England
and Scotland
from 1697 to 1765. …” Wordsworth Dictionary of 
British History

“ Legislation aimed at protecting British agriculture.    …became a major political issue after 1815.
A law of that year banning the import of foreign grain until the home price had
reached 80 shillings a quarter.  The
Anti-Corn Law League under Cobden and Bright 
denounced the system as benefiting 
landowners at everyone else’s expense”  

                                   “ The Wealth
of England” ..
Geo. Clark.

CAP payouts to UK landowners currently of £3.9bn p.a.,  is a refinement of this age-old
scam.  

Now there are no riots in the streets because politicians
have cut out the  transparent and tiresome
business of  linking rewards to  the price of food- which everyone could  understand and measure.  Today it is done remotely in Brussels
where NFU’s Sir Henry Plumb  helped draft
the legislation disguised as environmental payments. The modern equivalent of
corn law agitation would be housewives agitating for a level playing field for
garden birds. Urban householders should be rewarded equally with landowners,
for placing nesting boxes on the clothes pole, and reimbursed for buying bird
seed, feeding urban foxes  and leaving
lawn edges uncut to harbour hedgehogs.     James

 

 		 	   		  
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