Today, a woman from the Women’s Institute of Tutshill, Gloucestershire, made a wonderful protest outside the Houses of Parliament in Westminster by sitting in a bath of milk. The protest was about the declining price of milk (down now only to 18p per litre for the dairy farmer from 24.5p ten years ago).
We only have about 13,000 dairy farmers left in Britain and there is a very real danger of losing all milk production in a few years time. The Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) are making a piddly £1.3m available to dairy farmers to “address issues of efficiency.” Defra refuse to introduce a milk regulator and insist price negotiations should be a private commercial matter that government cannot get involved in so long as competition rules are being adhered to, however they continue to increase the burden of rules and regulations onto dairy farmers who cannot take the burden of the cost anymore.
How can Defra be singing from the same hymn sheet? On the one hand, this is a key department responsible for pushing forward plans to reduce carbon emissions and find more sustainable ways of producing energy, on the other, they are quite happy to ‘let markets decide’ where our milk comes from (even if that means yet more food miles). Cretinous.
This is so different to when I was at school in deepest West Yorkshire where snow meant snow. Although people from a distance might leave early, the snow was used as an opportunity for staff and pupils to let off steam, study nature and generally have some fun! We are becoming too risk averse – it is not healthy.
Hear, hear! That’s what I did; I went for a walk taking photos and I also used the wonders of modern technology to work from home, thus avoiding the hazardous aspects altogether, being safely tucked up in my cottage
The weather was fantastic and as we get snow so rarely these days why not look upon it as one of those wondrous things of nature rather than a cost to society…?