The crisis in the countryside has been headline news for weeks, but have you heard the name Barry Leathwood? Probably not, unless you follow farming politics closely. Leathwood is the secretary of the agricultural workers’ trade group of the Transport and General Workers’ Union. But many people think the only union in the business is the National Farmers’ Union (actually a union mainly of landowners and employers); nobody cares what the people who actually work the land think. The environment minister, Michael Meacher, has set up a task force that is supposed to represent all rural interests, but, shamefully, no representative of agricultural workers has been invited to join.
So Meacher will have no one to dispute the claim that foot-and-mouth was caused by horrid foreign meat imports. “The foot-and-mouth outbreak of 1967 was confined to the north-west and the west,” says Leathwood. “The reason it couldn’t be contained this time is the way animals are traded. If the sheep are in Devon and the best price to be had is in Cumbria, then 400 or so sheep are packed tightly into lorries and driven up to Cumbria. The next day, the best price might be in Essex, so the same sheep are packed into lorries and driven down there.
“We campaigned against the export of live animals because the way it is done is cruel, but we didn’t realise then how much they were being moved about in this country. That’s why every disease outbreak turns into a major national disaster.”
Leathwood notes that the food of his childhood was relatively free of pesticides and hormones, and was grown and reared locally. “There was a wide variety of animals farmed. Now farmers have been encouraged to maximise production, so they have concentrated on breeding the varieties of animals that answer this need.
“Every cow in Britain today can be traced back to about 12 steers in 1920. And herds are much bigger now, to give economies of scale. If there is a disease, then the bigger the herd, the bigger the problem.”
Meacher also risks falling for the lie that only townies want fox-hunting banned. Leathwood, aged 60, was brought up in the Cheshire countryside. His father was a farmworker before becoming a full-time district organiser for the National Union of Agricultural and Allied Workers. As soon as he could ride a bicycle, young Barry was collecting subscriptions. His mother wanted to save her children from the poverty that was the lot of most farmworkers – as the Leathwoods, who lived in a tied cottage for years and were evicted from it, knew better than most. So he became a toolmaker, but re- turned to the land and, 27 years ago, became a union district organiser like his father.
The members of Leathwood’s trade group oppose fox-hunting. He is contemptuous of the argument that abolishing fox-hunting will deprive them of jobs. Very few jobs will go, he says, and those few can easily be diverted into drag-hunting, a sport in which you either lay a trail for hounds to follow, or get an athlete to run away from them. And no, you don’t let the hounds tear the athlete apart. “You can have all the fancy dress, all the leaping over fences, I’ve no objection to that, and all it takes away is the kill at the end.”
In 1982, when Leathwood – a short, even-tempered man, engaging and fluent – was one of its younger stars, the agricultural workers’ union merged with the Transport and General Workers’ Union. Leathwood became secretary five years later.
His greatest triumph was saving the Agricultural Wages Board, the only such body to survive the Thatcher government. (Boards and councils had been set up before the First World War by Winston Churchill, as President of the Board of Trade, to set minimum wages in low-paid industries.) As a result, he negotiates annually with farmers and the government over the minimum rate of pay on the land. It is now £4.57 an hour, although the farmers have kept a £3.73 rate for casual workers – just 3p more than the national minimum wage. Gang-masters still contract with farmers to provide labour for particular jobs, sometimes using illegal immigrants and paying them less than the minimum hourly rate.
When Leathwood started working for the union, it had 100,000 members. Now, there are just 20,000 – about one-fifth of the workforce. There are several reasons for this. The workforce is declining; one in eight left the land in the 12 months to June last year. More than a third still live in tied cottages. Members rarely take industrial action, partly because they are scattered, partly because of their attitude to the job. There is a story about an official, fresh from the motor industry, who organised a strike on a pig farm and found the strike committee drawing up a rota to feed the pigs. “Can’t let pigs go hungry,” the shop steward told him.
The rural workers are rarely heard because the government and the press accept that landed interests have the sole right to speak for the countryside. What Leathwood says would surprise most people: “Every year, farmers get £3.5bn in subsidies, which is £1bn more than the total wages bill for the industry, and most of it goes to the biggest, 20 per cent of farms. We should be giving far more support to the organic sector. And if we want the landscape to look a certain way, we have to pay people to manage it rather than to farm it.”
Farmworkers see the damage that intensive farming does, but do not share in the profits it creates. It is easy to see why big farmers would prefer Leathwood’s voice to remain silent. It is harder to see why Meacher obligingly declines to hear it.
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