From: Peter Packham, Shadwell Lane, Leeds.

It is a bit rich of Mike Jordan, interim chair of Reform UK Wetherby and Easingwold, to write complaining about the treatment of farmers (The Yorkshire Post Letters, November 9, 2024).

Last year, the farmers magazine Farmers Weekly, carried out a survey of its readers asking how leaving the EU had affected their businesses and concluded “farmers and those working in the ancillary industries are far from satisfied with Brexit”.

This is the same Brexit that the majority shareholder and owner of Reform UK, Nigel Farage campaigned so hard to achieve.

Farmers protest outside the Northern Farming Conference in Hexham in Northumberland against the government's proposals to reform inheritance tax (IHT) rules. PIC: Owen Humphreys/PA Wire

placeholder image — Farmers protest outside the Northern Farming Conference in Hexham in Northumberland against the government's proposals to reform inheritance tax (IHT) rules. PIC: Owen Humphreys/PA Wire

A striking 69 per cent of those surveyed felt that Brexit had been “fairly negative” or “very negative”, with only 12 per cent feeling that it had been “fairly positive” or “very positive”.

Another striking result was that 70 per cent of farmers surveyed felt that the UK should at least rejoin the single European market – a figure that rose to 85 per cent in the case of those working in the ancillary industries.

Farmers have faced criticism for apparently voting for Brexit, but they were encouraged to do so by people like Nigel Farage who told them everything would be better if the UK left the EU which, of course, is not true.

Your correspondent also complained that by importing more food we would be “at the mercy of aggressive commodity market pricing” and make us “dependent on the whims of unstable global politics”.

That is precisely what Brexit did. We import about 30 per cent of our food from the EU, which has been made more difficult since Brexit, not to mention the issues British farmers face to export their produce to Europe.

I am not a scholar of the bible, but it tells us to “Remove the beam from your own eye”, maybe Mr Jordan and the rest of his so-called political “party” should listen.