At six o’clock on Sunday morning I was standing on what used to be my lawn, decanting a washing-up bowl of grey water onto a hydrangea like a man disposing of evidence. The hosepipe has just been banned. The water butt gave up in May. The lawn itself is now the colour and texture of a digestive biscuit.
Everyone of a certain age says the same thing: this is 1976 again. Standpipes in the street, ladybirds in biblical quantities, and a government so rattled it appointed an actual Minister for Drought, whereupon it promptly rained for a month. We got through it because it was a freak. It has stopped being a freak.
The Met Office spent June marking fifty years since the legendary summer of 1976, still the hottest and sunniest on record, its peak temperature now beaten on six days in the past decade. Meanwhile the Environment Agency’s latest bulletin reads like the opening chapter of a disaster novel: five water companies imposing hosepipe bans, reservoirs below average, and 729 separate restrictions on farmers’ abstraction licences while winter storage reservoirs drain and East Anglian livestock men run out of forage in July.
My lawn will recover. The people who grow your dinner may not.
Consider Jeremy Clarkson, Britain’s most heavily televised farmer. He says last year’s scorched summer gave him the second worst harvest in living memory, with yields down as much as 40 per cent, and he has admitted that Diddly Squat will not make money on wheat and barley. Read that again. A man with an Amazon contract, a farm shop, a pub and several million viewers cannot make the actual farming bit of his farm pay. Now picture the farm three miles down the road with the same weather, the same costs and no camera crew.
And what is the Government’s grand plan for these people? There is no drought fund, no irrigation strategy worth the name, no serious word about food security from a Treasury that can always find a few billion down the sofa for something shinier. Increasingly, the plan is to pay them to stop.
It is as if Rolls-Royce had hit a rough patch and its biggest customer, rather than ordering engines, offered a stipend to let wildflowers grow through the assembly line. Not as a sideline. As the business. The lathes fall silent, the apprentices retrain as meadow wardens, the annual report is retitled A Celebration of Grasses. Everyone applauds the biodiversity, right up until the day the country needs an engine.
That is not a wild caricature of rural policy. Under the sustainable farming schemes, the state pays handsomely per hectare for flower-rich margins, herbal leys and freshly planted trees, while the market pays a wheat price that frequently fails to cover the cost of growing wheat. The Government’s own food security analysis concedes that if every land-use and climate policy were enacted in full, almost a quarter of our farmland could come out of food production.
Business readers will recognise the disease instantly, because it is not really about farming at all. It is about price signals. When the subsidy for not producing exceeds the margin for producing, any rational operator stops producing. You do not need a conspiracy; a spreadsheet will do. Farmers are not sowing wildflower meadows because they have gone soft. They are sowing them because they are the only crop in Britain with a guaranteed buyer.
Which brings us, inevitably, to Rachel Reeves. Farming’s income statement was already wrecked by the weather. The Chancellor then went after the balance sheet, with her 20 per cent inheritance levy on farms worth over £1 million, unmoved by the tractors on Whitehall and by analysis suggesting the raid could end up costing the Treasury £2 billion. Drought is nature’s nail in the coffin of the family farm. The tractor tax is the man-made one, and it was hammered in deliberately.
The bill lands with the rest of us. Retailers report that hot weather is already pushing food prices up as domestic yields shrivel, and peers have warned that taps could run dry by mid-century without serious investment. Food security is infrastructure, every bit as much as runways and reservoirs. We would never pay Heathrow to grow moss on its runways and then act surprised when nothing lands.
In 1976 we scraped through because the rain came back and farming was still stubborn, solvent and everywhere. In 2026 the rain will come back eventually. The farmers, once gone, will not.
Meanwhile I shall be out at dawn with my washing-up bowl, keeping one hydrangea alive in a dead brown garden. It is ornamental, it produces nothing, and it survives entirely on handouts. I have decided to call it British agricultural policy.
