TRANSPARENT TORY FARM PLOT

By our farming editor, Jeffoff Myland

WATCH out for some transparent Tory jiggery-pokery coming up on Labour-daft Crumberland Council next week.

A pair of Conservative councillors are going to try and force the Council’s loony left leadership to fire off a snotty letter to Chancer of the Exchequer, Rachel Thieves, about her farm tax grab.

Point 1: The two Tory councillors know that the slavishly obedient Labour Council will do no such thing because politics being what it is, it would amount to smearing its own Government and the county’s budget-backing Labour MPs, eg Minns, MacAlister, Campbell-Savours & Scrogham.

Point 2: It’s an ill-disguised plot to draw unflattering media coverage onto the Labour Council who, the Tories will loudly crow, are: “Refusing to support local farmers!”

All’s unfair in love and politics and this type of gamesmanship is now standard – even at local council level – whereas not all that long ago they largely tried to work together for Cumbria.

(PS: Big Government no longer listens to local councils and, sadly, never changes its mind on the back of a letter from one in the sticks!)

But the lengths to which the Labour Council leadership will go to wriggle out of writing a pointless critical letter should at least make next week’s The Crumbling News worth a read.

Ever since the farm tax grab was announced, CN’s long-suffering but super prolific farming editor, Maureen Hodges, has campaigned long and hard on behalf of Cumbria’s farmers and will be sure to be there taking note.

Her blistering coverage for Scroogequest – genuinely running to pages and pages and pages has AWARD WINNER written all over it – containing as it does interviews with ACTUAL farmers and HOLDING Cumbria’s budget-backing Labour MPs to account.

Super Mo’s impressive output on this issue has left the paper’s nearest newspaper competitor, The Slumberland & Westmorland Imperilled, fast asleep at the (tractor) wheel.

When it comes to the Government’s farm tax grab story, “The Imperilled” briefly got its wellies on and coughed up the bare minimum before going for a lie down.

There was never much prospect of a hard-hitting campaign emerging from the dry barren fields of the Imperilled’s weekly farming section.

Instead, its Farming Editor continues to rake over much of the same old manure that the 165-year-old paper has ploughed for years and years.

That is reconstituted Press Releases, poor photographs and endless mart prices in a font so small that they remain barely visible to the naked eye.