It is hard to imagine a political battle with such divergent protagonists. On one side Mark Drakeford, the outgoing Welsh First Minister; on the other, thousands of Welsh farmers who are revolting against his government’s proposed Sustainable Farming Scheme (SFS). Drakeford, the former academic and social worker, is a creature of windowless conference rooms and dreary party political meetings. If you asked artificial intelligence to generate an image of an “impossibly bland sociologist”, it would send back a Drakeford mugshot. The most telling fact about him, a fascinating and under-discussed figure, is this: during the pandemic, when Drakeford vanquished Covid by banning Welsh supermarkets from selling toys, he told an interviewer that he was isolating in a miniature hut at the bottom of his garden, away from his family. He seemed delighted.
The Welsh farmers who help to feed this country did not have the option of sitting out Covid in tiny sheds. I imagine they were quite busy. Few groups in Britain are as reliant on the whims of regulators, markets, negotiators, shifting ideological fashions and politicians as they are; few groups are as powerless. Their protests in recent weeks, which mirror similar rebellions in continental Europe and were unerringly foreseen in Michel Houellebecq’s choppy 2019 novel Sérotonine, have attracted little attention in the rest of Britain.
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