Farm subsidies are badly spent, but don’t contact DEFRA, don’t write to your MEP...

Ever wondered where all those billions the EU spends on farm subsidies goes? To French farmers, perhaps, who take time out from setting fire to tractors and dumping manure outside public buildings to pick up their fat cheques? Or is much of it spent on the shortly-to-be-abolished system of set-aside, under which farmers are paid to grow nothing at all? Or is it spent to ensure affordable food for people on low incomes?

Actually, small French farmers are being driven off the land in droves, agricultural land in France having fallen in real value by 75% in just over a quarter of a century. Set-aside has been an enormous success in encouraging biodiversity, in part thanks to those same farmers, who believe it or not really do interest themselves in such things. And you know all about the last item on the list.

Subsidies being subject to no effective ceilings, individuals and firms can access huge sums if they know their way around the system. The prince of Monaco, for example, despite not even being resident in the EU, picks up € 300,000 a year, but this is put into the shade by the millions paid out to brewers such as Heineken and the tobacco company Philip Morris. Even the Dutch national airline, KLM stand son the list of recipients.

Things are just as bad in the United States, but there it is quite rightly regarded as a scandal and politicians are being pushed into action. Even the White House has proposed limiting farm subsidies to individuals whose incomes are lower than $200,000 per year.

Why aren’t people similarly up in arms in Europe? Why aren’t they demanding that subsidies go to help farmers who need the money, in return for their fulfilling their role as custodians of the environment and the landscape? Why do they put up with the EU stealing their tax moneys and using them to line the pockets of the already rich?

The implications of what I believe to be the answer to this go beyond the immediate issue. If DEFRA was solely responsible, we would know to whom we should write, where we should demonstrate, and what we should be demanding decision-makers do. Come an election, we could question candidates and read manifestos and vote for those who promised to take action.

So what do you do if the EU is flushing your money down the toilet, or handing it over to fabulously wealthy foreign monarchs?

That wasn’t a rhetorical question, by the way. You can do two things: write to your MEP, or write to the Minister of Agriculture.

The only trouble is, your minister can and will be outvoted, and the European Parliament has no more power over Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy than it does over China’s equivalent.

Of course, only xenophobes and throwbacks oppose the European Reform Treaty, despite the fact that it would represent yet another step away from anything resembling democracy, which I always understood was a system under which the people elected men and women to represent and mediate their various and generally conflicting interests, and that those men and women would then be answerable to them.

So no-one is up in arms about this scandalous waste of money because they know very well that there is nothing whatsoever they can do about it.