AS A country parson for 13 years, I got to know farmers well. Very down-to-earth sorts they are too. I recall a rather delicate individual complaining to a farmer's wife after the annual agricultural show dinner that, in his speech, her husband had made too many earthy references. "For goodness sake, instead of 'manure', can't you get him to say 'fertiliser'?" The farmer's wife replied: "I've only just got him to say 'manure'!"

Whatever tales people like to tell of rich farmers, it's a hard life. As one farmer said ruefully: "Perennials are crops that grow like weeds; biennials are the crops that die this year rather than next; and hardy annuals are those that don't come up at all."

Now the farmers are having the worst time since the depressions of the 18th and 19th Centuries. British farming standards are among the highest in the world, yet the fanatics issue still more calls for animal welfare improvements. But consumers won't pay the cost of these higher standards and the result is that British farmers are priced out of the market as customers buy more cheaply from abroad where animal welfare standards are actually lower. A particularly ripe piece of idiocy and injustice happened this week when the Advertising Standards Authority banned the promotion of top quality British pork - because the advertisements offended vegetarians and animal welfare campaigners and were deemed to be unfair to foreign competitors.

Then there is the so called Climate Change Levy which is in reality just another stealth tax that will do nothing for what we used to call "the land" - but now are forced to refer to as "the environment" - and it will merely help to price more farmers out of business. Between 1998 and 2000, more than 51,000 farmers left the industry, farm incomes fell by 70 per cent so now the average annual income is reduced to £5,200 with borrowings at a record £10bn and investment lower than at any time since the 1970s.

Meanwhile environmentalists perpetuate the lies about farmers "destroying the countryside". In fact, the latest figures from the Department of Trade and Industry show that farmers planted 7,000 miles of hedges in the 1990s and restored 9,000 miles more. No wonder suicides of farmers are six times the number in the rest of the population - 77 in 1999. Farming failures do not attract the same degree of sympathy as factory closures. When a factory closes, hundreds of workers all in one place are suddenly out of a job; but with farms spread over vast areas of countryside, the effects are not so visible. But attention is going to be drawn to the farmers' plight on March 18 when perhaps as many as half a million people will join the Countryside March through London - perhaps the largest demonstration the capital has ever seen.

Sometimes we see the malign hand of the EU in some very obvious way that affects everybody - like the Common Agricultural Policy, for instance. But here is a nasty little example that has gone almost unreported. English churches receive no financial help from the state and yet they have to maintain 40 per cent of the nation's Grade One Listed buildings. Because these beautiful buildings are usually hundreds of years old, the materials for their repair are rare and costly. These costs are crippling the parishes. Credit where it's due, Gordon Brown tried to do something to ease the burden: he proposed lowering the VAT churches have to pay on their repair bills from 17 per cent to five per cent. But he can't do this because EU rules won't let him. Yet the Euro-fanatics still cry: "There is no superstate." The fact is that in more and more areas of national life, the government of our country is being removed from Parliament and given into the hands of unelected continental socialist federalists.

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