BY ROGER WATSON

Plans to create a unitary mayoral authority covering the present East Riding of Yorkshire Council area including Hull, which presently has its own city council, were published on the 23rd of November 2023. The details are contained in the Hull and East Yorkshire Devolution Deal.

As I explained recently in the Daily Sceptic, a major plank of the devolution proposals is achieving net zero and all manner of green gobbledegook is contained therein. We have the false promises about ‘green jobs’ which to date have proved to be both few and far between and, where they exist, an expensive luxury. Managing the water levels in the major rivers of East Yorkshire, which is prone to flooding, is covered and we will have ‘active transport’ policies, the trains will run on time, and more quickly. There is mention of allowing ‘the natural environment to thrive’ and supporting ‘the delivery of England’s new Environmental Improvement Plan’.

You might think that farming would be worthy of a mention, given its importance to the region and its direct influence on some aspects of the policies. But you’d be wrong. A word search of the Devolution Deal for ‘farms’, ‘farming’, ‘farmers’ or ‘agriculture’ yielded nothing.

Yet, farmland constitutes 90% of the area of East Riding of Yorkshire and the council recently claimed that they had a ‘highly-developed sense of the farming sectors’ continuing importance in shaping the area that is the East Riding’ and that farming ‘underpins a number of key clusters that strengthen the area’s economic identity’. While the Council says that farming contributes a ‘relatively modest 2-3% of the area’s economy and employment’, over 31,000 people work in farming in East Riding of Yorkshire, farms employ an average of 2.6 people per farm and for 51% of them it is their full time employment.

According to Farming and land use (eastriding.gov.uk) which provides a comprehensive overview of the importance of agriculture and land management in the East Riding of Yorkshire, farmers are described as ‘custodians of local ecosystem services’ and farming has a role in promoting water quality by ‘regulating water levels and managing soils, and the promotion of biodiversity’. Farming also has a role in ‘balancing food production, environmental stewardship, and climate change mitigation and adaptation in the East Riding of Yorkshire’.

It is unfathomable how, in a document that refers to the environment, flood management and, indeed, ‘biodiversity net gain’, the authors could omit to mention the very people and the very industry which has been engaging with these issues for decades. Unfathomable, that is, until you consider that the obsession with the low carbon economy overrides all other considerations.

You can bet your Tesla that the people who prepared the Devolution Deal are not sons of the soil. They will be members of the nefarious ‘blob’ whose main purpose, when it comes to all things environmental, is to impose misery on a recalcitrant population. A population which, in their minds, continues to guzzle gas, pollute the atmosphere and contribute to global warming. They are well and truly captured by the climate change cult and will not rest until we are all brought into line.

The blob cannot imagine that anyone below them in the political food chain will do anything unless it is an imperative, a strategy, an order even. Thus, activities which people simply do for the love of it and because it is necessary for their living and ours such as managing water levels and ensuring biodiversity, all integral aspects of producing the food we eat, have to become policies and framed under the rubric of achieving net zero.

Net zero is a top down policy which is being imposed on a population that did not vote for it and which, largely, does not want it. It is ideologically driven by people who listen to the wrong advisers – invariably other people like themselves – and, as the Devolution Deal demonstrates, are woefully ignorant of how the world works.

Roger Watson is a Registered Nurse and Editor-in-Chief of Nurse Education in Practice.