Why Cameron's CAP doesn't sit comfortably on Scottish heads

David Cameron - Proud of his Scottish Heritage

Unlike many in his party, David Cameron is a keen supporter of the Union.  The Tories have hardly had a sniff in Scotland since Margaret Thatcher did so much to alienate even affluent or aspirational Scots.  Consequently, there are those in the Conservative Party who would not shed any tears if Scotland voted to go its own way in September’s referendum, but the Prime Minister is not one of them.

Partly no doubt he is aware of his own place in history.  He does not want to be remembered as the PM who lost Scotland?  Perhaps the fact that his own great grandfather was once a hill farmer near Inverness plays a part.  But more than any of that, he just has a genuine and deeply ingrained sense of Britishness, of Britain’s shared history, culture and traditions.

This is the reason that he has largely kept himself out of the debate.  He is well aware of how a southern, public school educated Conservative would go down north of the border, and particularly how Scotland’s redoubtable First Minister, Alex Salmond, could make political capital with that.  His one significant contribution was an impassioned plea delivered from The Olympic Park in London last February.  Speaking from the outside to the people of Scotland he said as emphatically as he could, “We want you to stay!”  He later revealed that his aides had tried to steer him off the subject, but he said, “I care far too much" about preventing the UK from being "torn apart" to stay out of the debate.

Ironic then that the Cameron Government’s handling of agriculture might turn out to be the issue which tilts Scotland toward a Yes vote.

The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy is a huge and unwieldy edifice.  Although reduced from its heyday in the 1970s when it accounted for 71% of the community’s expenditure it still makes up a whopping 39%, making it by some measure the largest of the EU’s initiatives.  No longer concerned exclusively with securing food production the CAP now includes targets for environmental protection, social cohesion and regional regeneration across the 28 member states.  Everyone agrees it needs to be reformed.  But equally everyone has their own differing notions of what needs to change and how it should be done.  Unsurprisingly then reforms take a long time to agree and implement.  They more or less come in ten year cycles with the latest version designed to cover the period from 2014 to 2020.

Negotiations were intense and often fraught, but the final deal, seen as a victory for the reformers, saw a 3% reduction in overall CAP spending from the Commission’s original proposal, translating to a 13% real-terms reduction in payments to farmers across the continent.  Payments are made in two so-called Pillars.

Pillar 1, The Single Farm Payment, is based on the number of hectares in stewardship.  This represents a shift away from the old measure of production.  Within Pillar 1 there is a commitment that by 2019 no member state should receive less than an averaged rate of €196 per hectare.

Pillar 2 is the Rural Development Programme designed to give additional help to areas with special needs.  Officially the calculations for the breakdown of the rural development budget between member states is based on a combination of past performance and 'objective criteria' such as area of farm land or number of farms.  In reality it is much more opaque than that, and several member states were able to negotiate additional funding.

The allocations from both Pillars are paid to national governments to distribute internally.  The UK Government’s allocation, to be further divided between England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, amounts to €3.549 billion in 2014, rising to €3.592 billion in 2019 under Pillar 1. Critically, this figure includes a “convergence uplift” because UK farm receipts per hectare fall below 90% of the community average.  Under Pillar 2 the UK will receive €2.580 billion for the period 2014 – 2020.

To complicate matters further, member states were given some ‘pillar to pillar flexibility’.  In most cases this means they can transfer up to 15% of the money from Pillar 1 to Pillar 2, or vice versa. The Commission had to receive notification of any proposed reallocations by 31 December last year.

The Scottish Government, and the Edinburgh Parliament, argued that the whole of the UK’s uplift payment should go to Scotland.  The rationale being that it was only Scotland’s very low per hectare rate that brings the UK as a whole below the EU’s 90 per cent threshold. Scotland’s average rate is only around 45 per cent of the EU average, think of those huge upland hill farms.  By comparison, England, Wales and Northern Ireland’s rates are either at or above the EU average.

Instead, the UK Government decided to pro-rata the Uplift payment among each of the receiving nations.  Accordingly Scotland will get only 16% of this uplift.

The SNP and the Vote Yes campaign have naturally painted this as a direct loss to Scottish farmers of €187m.

To make matters worse, after absorbing the 13% real terms cut to direct Pillar 1 payments, the average per hectare rate in Scotland will drop to around €128 per hectare by 2019, forecast to be the lowest in the EU.  Of course Alex Salmond can rightly claim that by the EU’s own rules, if Scotland were a member state and not merely a region, it would have to receive no less that €196 per hectare. In other words Scottish farmers are paying €68 per hectare for the privilege of being in the UK.

Pillar 2 payments fare no better.  Here the UK government has decided to retain internal allocations based on historical patterns.  Scotland will receive 18.5% of the total, around €477.8m.  But again on a per hectare basis that puts them at a miserly €12 per hectare.  Compare that with the allocation to the EU’s newest member, Croatia, whose Pillar 2 allocation works out at €250 per hectare.

Ordinarily much of this detail would go unnoticed by the mass of the population, but not this year, not with financial comparisons between Scotland and her southern neighbour very much at the heart of the referendum campaign.

Alex Salmond, Scotland's First Minister

“Tories have handed Scotland worst deal in Europe” howls the SNP website this week.  ”The Tories in Westminster…have handed Scotland the worst CAP deal in Europe and negotiated Scotland to the bottom of the CAP funding league tables.” 

Scottish farmers do have a case.  If the CAP serves any purpose then it should be to support struggling farmers in economically disadvantaged regions of Europe.  It was within the powers of the Westminster Government to bring about a fairer distribution of CAP money in Scotland, but for now it looks like a huge gift to the Yes campaign.

It will be ironic if David Cameron, the great grandson of a Scottish farmer, should go down in history as the prime Minster who lost Scotland because of his government’s agricultural policy.  

Why I like JD Wetherspoon's

I like Wetherspoons. There. I’ve said it!  For many years my attitude to this pubco has ranged between one of sneering superiority to downright hostility, but the time has come to say I was wrong.

Let’s begin by acknowledging there’s good reason to be wary of this behemoth.  I used to say that JD Wetherspoon was to the pub trade what Tesco was to retailing.  At the last count there were over 800 branches and new ones open all the time. Wetherspoon’s pubs tend to be huge, typically carved out of old banks or industrial premises.  Inside they are formulaic, somewhere between of a sort of stylised London bar and a gentlemen’s club, but unquestionably faux. They use their scale to get cheap prices from their suppliers and this allows them to undercut small independent retailers. And it seems there is no segment of the hospitality market they won’t attempt to tap.  In the morning the Wetherspoon is  a greasy spoon , selling fried breakfasts; by day it’s a coffee bar.  Hot meals are served all day and by night they offer a range of drinks from real ales to cocktails in jugs.

I grew up in a little market town with over thirty pubs.  Many were small traditional drinking dens, and several of them struggled to survive.  When Wetherspoon’s first applied for a licence in the town I lined up with the local landlords to oppose the application.

However, that very breadth is a weakness. Wetherspoons are a jack of all trades and predictably much of what they offer is somewhat second rate.  To be honest breakfast is probably better in your high street café. Wetherspoon’s boast that on Thursday night they are the nation’s biggest curry house, but the food isn’t a patch on the local tandoori.  Their marketing literature calls them “The posh pub company”.  They are not!

Judged by the guiding principals of this blog, the company does not appear to score very highly.  Their food is not seasonal or local.  The same menu is available from Penzance to Peterhead with only a couple of regional variations listed as “Scottish Classics”*, and most of it is not even cooked locally! Apart from steaks and items that go in the deep fat fryer, all the food is precooked and delivered ready chilled.  A delivery truck brings everything for the following week in one drop straight from the central depot.  The system of regular ‘clubs’, Steak Club on Tuesday, Fish Friday and so on, is really a series of cleverly presented price promotions which gives them a high degree of certainty about future sales for the week ahead.

OK,  so what’s to like?

Well for a start I like their opening hours.  The doors open daily at 8.30 and they are open until midnight five days a week, one a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays.  And they serve food (and coffee), until 11.00 p.m.  Having lived in the Far East where business is conducted 24x7, it drives me mad to find so many British pubs close their kitchens at 9.00p.m. or even 8.30.

Wetherspoon’s is family friendly by design. At 5.00 o’clock each evening my local Wetherspoon’s, The Joseph Morton, resembles nothing more than a giant children’s tea party.  To be honest, I give the place a wide berth, but better that than feed children’s addiction for McDonalds.  My own kids are adults these days but I well remember being turned away from pubs, or crammed in to dingy ‘family rooms’  when looking for somewhere to eat.  Back then a local Wetherspoon’s would have been a godsend.

Plus a side affect of this is that they are places that women of all ages are comfortable to go into for a coffee or a glass of wine.  That’s not true of all bars in the UK.

And I like the company’s ethical stance.

For many firms Corporate Social Responsibility is little more than a few well chosen platitudes on the company’s web site. But Wetherspoon’s  delivers. CSR is not about eye catching acts of heroism.  It’s about doing the right thing in small ways consistently throughout your business.

Wetherspoon’s build long term relationships with their suppliers and set ethical standards for them to achieve. They buy British when possible. All their beef and pork is sourced from Britain and Ireland.  Their chicken and eggs are all British and free-range.  Their fish comes from sustainable fisheries in Britain and Iceland.  their Lavazza coffee is certified by the Rainforest Alliance

They recycle.  In a ground -breaking innovation, the same trucks that deliver the food from the national distribution centre in Daventry, handle the reverse logistics of aluminium cans and packaging materials which are taken back to the company’s own recycling centre co-located there.  Last year, according to the website, the centre processed 5,000 tonnes of cardboard and paper, 2500 tonnes of cooking oil, 400 tonnes of plastic, and 177 tonnes of steel.  Glass bottles are recycled in partnership with suppliers.  Last year over 12,800 tonnes of glass was recycled.

Wetherspoon works with Carbon Statement to obtain an independently audited weekly report for each of their pubs.  This allows them to work toward their Carbon Reduction Commitment as part of the UK government scheme.

They are also good to their staff.  Unlike other pubcos such as Punch Taverns, which seem to serve no purpose but to cream profit off the top and drive hard working publicans to penury, Wetherspoon runs a national training scheme for both kitchen and front of house staff. The company prefers to promote from within its own ranks.  For the past two years this has been recognised by the CRF Institute which has voted the company one of Britain’s Best Employers.  That’s quite an accolade in an industry which is known for paying minimum wage and hiring and firing low skilled workers.

As an ale drinker, I love the fact that Wetherspoon’s supports Britain’s independent brewers.  In addition to resident ales such as Adnam’s Broadside or Fuller’s London Pride, they all feature regular guest ales. One of the establishments that I know best personally is the Towan Blystra in Newquay.  They normally have eight beers on hand pump, in addition to Guinness, eight lagers and three draft ciders.  And they are all well kept and well served.  The company regularly partners with craft brewers to produce special edition ales exclusively available in Wetherspoon’s pubs.  This wins them accreditation both from from CAMRA and Cask Marque.

Of course the one word which is always attached to Wetherspoon’s is ‘cheap’.  There’s no getting around it, whether you want to take the family out for dinner or enjoy a couple of drinks, this place is a cheap option.

Now I am not a fan of cheap food per se.  Cheap food often comes at a high cost to the environment, to animals and to humans working in production or distribution.  But the way JD does it, with long term relationships with identifiable partners, seems okay.  If the web site is to be believed, many of these partners are small, family run businesses, and as mentioned previously Wetherspoon’s use their influence to ensure minimum standards of ethical practice across the supply chain.

The result is hundreds of frankly unbeatable prices: a pint of beer for under £2; double up any gin, vodka or whisky for an extra £1; a burger and chips for £4.39; curry, served with rice, naan bread, poppadum and chutney for £6.49, and that includes a free pint of beer! And so on and on.  The food snob in me says you get what you pay for, and it’s true the food is not fancy.  But its main sin is to be mass produced and ‘cooked’ by advanced microwave technicians, nothing worse.  Frankly in the current economic climate, when nearly a million Britons regularly depend on food banks, there is a place for JD Wetherspoon and his cheap meals.

And what of poor local businesses struggling to compete?  Well as I have alluded to repeatedly, Wetherspoon’s is not perfect. Local firms have many advantages if they stop and think about it, and they really should not be competing solely on price anyway.

One thousand pubs close and disappear annually in Britain. Drinking habits change and the licensed trade needs to move with the times.  I was wrong to oppose Wetherspoon’s licence back in my old market town.  Dingy, smoke filled  little tap rooms selling pints of mild to old men playing shove ha’penny might sound picturesque but my friends and I never went there.  The truth is those pubs were dead already and frankly good riddance!  They were part of an old disappearing Britain. Wetherspoon’s may not be the future but they very much chime with the present.  They have hit upon a formula which works.  The business is successful, their pubs fulfill a market need and the evidence is that people seem to like them.  Alright so Wetherspoon’s  bars aren’t your traditional old British pubs with jugs of foaming ale, inglenook fireplace and home cooked meals.  They aren’t gastro pubs either, but they are alright.  Is there a place in our town centres for a basic, well run bar offering cheap food and cheap drinks? A place where you can order a cappuccino at 11.00 p.m. or a caipirinha without being laughed at?  Absolutely there is.

See you in ‘Spoon’s!

*Welsh and Northern Irish Classics also exist.