According to the Telegraph, farmers will be given funds to restore natural habitats and re-wild Britain under new government schemes designed to replace EU subsidies. George Eustice will this week unveil plans for two new environmental land management schemes seen as crucial to halting the decline in biodiversity,

At the Oxford Farming Conference on Thursday, the Environment Secretary will set out details of a new Local Nature Recovery scheme, which will pay farmers to create new habitats, plant trees, and restore peat and wetland areas. Speaking ahead of the conference, Mr Eustice said: “Successful and profitable agricultural production is crucial to our food security”.

This is the same George Eustace who in July last year signalled new meat and dairy carbon taxes. Researchers said such a tax would cost the economy £242 million a year, and could also force grazing livestock farms out of the industry, even when grassland is ‘the most sensible land use at that particular location’.

NFU president Minette Batters told LBC at the time that a meat tax would ‘put farmers out of business’, particularly as the government signed post-Brexit trade deals with major agricultural producers.

“If we start to tax farmers here and we don’t expect the same of other countries that we are importing a lot more food from – we’ve just signed a deal obviously with New Zealand and with Australia – and we’re planning to completely liberalise. “So if you’re going to tax farmers here, not tax farmers in other countries, that’s just going to put our farmers out of business,” she said.

Whether or not this sees Johnson’s Tories emulate the EU by introducing carbon border taxes remains to be seen, but if that is the intention, why even bother striking free trade deals? And if not, why are we giving a market preference to farmers on the opposite side of the planet while paying our own to effectively phase out food production and taxing farmers out of business?

If anything, the Tories should be keen to exploit the benefits for Brexit by ridding us of centralised EU standard slaughterhouses and instead promote local meat production, reducing food miles and stress on animals. Though the Tories are right to support biodiversity efforts as part of a broader environmental strategy, food production is still central to the character of our countryside and an essential part of rural life. Farmers are not park keepers and they don’t want to be either.

Moreover, essential to maintaining the character of our countryside is controlling population growth. Our ancient market towns and villages are priceless, and once they’re surrounded by badly built new housing estates and vast solar farms, we have lost something that can never be replaced. We would suggest that if the Tories are serious about rewilding, they should start with the fenland they defaced with solar panels and the moors they plastered with useless windmills.

Brexit is a mixed bag for British agriculture. Though freed from the dead hand of the EU’s common agricultural policy, it needs the backing of our politicians, but sell-your-own-granny Tories are only interested in consumer prices – even if that means a derelict countryside – failing to appreciate the tourism value of a well tended landscape. Obsessed with the dogma of “free trade”, the Tories have forgotten that real conservatism is more than just free markets. It’s about our obligation to preserve that which we inherited for future generations.

As it stands, Tory agriculture policy is an unwholesome muddle of conflicting priorities and our domestic policy is clearly not informing our trade policy. Infused with the foolishness of Net Zero and passing fads such as rewilding, the Tories have put their green agenda ahead of food security just as they did with affordable heating. They talk about sustainable agriculture then open our borders to cheaper, inferior imported foods while smacking our farmers with taxes. They talk about biodiversity while installing more bird choppers on our coastlines.

As with much else, there is no coherent agenda at work. Rather we see the Westminster bubble imposing its virtue signalling stupidity on us and there is no strategic thinking going on. Brexit calls for a radical rethink of our food supply and a complete change in how we operate, but the Tories don’t have the imagination or the talent or the courage. They won’t take on the green blob and they dare not diverge from the EU.

Ultimately the Tories will leave us with a ruined countryside and a bankrupt farming sector, making us more reliant on food imports than ever – just as we’re discovering, thanks to Covid, how fragile global supply chains really are. They’ll get their “rewilding” but only because our farmers will abandon the countryside. Britain deserves better.