Ed Miliband’s solar parks and Angela Rayner’s housing push threaten food supplies (Image: Getty)
The UK already imports roughly 40% of the food we eat, leaving us vulnerable to global markets, wars and climate shocks. This summer showed just how vulnerable we are. Britain has endured record heat and widespread drought, with half of England formally declared in drought. It could be our worst harvest on record. British farmers are at “crisis point” and urgently warning of mass food shortages in 2027 without “immediate government action”. Unfortunately, the Labour government risks making this crisis even worse, by launching a three-pronged assault on the British countryside.
As energy secretary, Ed Miliband gave the green light to plaster fertile land with sprawling, ugly solar parks. Ground-mounted solar now covers around 21,200 hectares of countryside, and Miliband has bullied through much more. Huge tracts of farmland are being turned over to rows of silicon panels when we desperately need to boost domestic food production.
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Solar defenders say the areas involved are small and that sheep can graze beneath panels. But farmers are fighting to defend their land, even though they could earn more from a solar park. There are plenty of rooftops, warehouses and car parks that could carry solar panels without swallowing productive countryside. But that’s only the start of the threat.
As the population rockets, Angela Rayner is driving Labour’s plan to build 1.5 million homes during this Parliament, in what’s been called a charter for the destruction of the countryside. Developers want the cheapest, easiest land to build on. They love a nice green field, rather than a brownfield site they have to clear first. Which is why Rayner is pushing ahead with its planning revolution and weakening traditional barriers to development.
Every field turned into a housing estate is a field that can no longer grow food. And now there’s a third threat that Labour is pushing: the artificial intelligence boom. Labour is throwing its weight behind a massive expansion of AI data centres, which need enormous sites and vast quantities of electricity and water wherever they pop up.
The government has designated data centres as critical national infrastructure, and hundreds of projects are being planned or awaiting grid connections. Originally, most were in light industrial areas like Slough. But increasingly, huge, unsightly, noisy, thirsty plants are looming over our countryside, destroying views, property values and historic vistas forever. Just look what’s happening to beautiful Devon.
Labour is piling pressure on Britain’s farmland from every direction: solar parks, housing developments and sprawling data centres. All while farmers are battling the worst weather in living memory and we’re ever more dependent on food imports that are becoming increasingly expensive and unreliable.
Andy Burnham also risks tying the hands of its crop scientists, as closer alignment with EU rules could make it harder to develop and deploy gene-edited crops designed to survive drought, disease and climate change.
British agriculture is under seige, and our countryside urgently needs protecting. Yet Labour has launched an all-out war on it. We need to be producing more of our own food, not paving over the land that produces it. Burnham must back down before Labour starves us out.