THE British Food Festival turned out to be a great success. You know the one I told you about where Brussels and the EU were getting upset about use of the word British. Also the top brass at Department of Food and Rural Affairs thought it better to stand aside in case they offended the powers that be in the EU. In other words to talk about BRITISH Food would not be politically correct.

I don’t know whatever they would think about me for I go much further and talk about British Food produced by British farmers on British farms.

Perhaps I will be sunk without trace. But as Lord Wooley used to say when he was Harold Wooley, president of the NFU, “You can shoot me, run me over or do what you like, but I’ll never get out of the way”. I like to think my pride in being British and in most things British is unshakeable. When someone sings the praises of the global market I tend to say: “But there isn’t a global market”, to which they will say: “How do you make that out”. My reply would be: “Well look at it this way, if producers round the globe were required to produce to the same high standards as we have to meet, then it might be a global market, but until that happens it won’t be”. Never mind having them produce down to a price, get them all producing up to a standard. And, whether bureaucrats like it or not and whether it’s politically correct or not, I’m still going to say it – up to the British standard.

I remember a soldier turned poultry farmer used to say: “Them as doesn’t know shouldn’t say, they might ‘appen p’raps be wrong”. Could there be a more apt message for all those politicians who would do away with farmers and import the food from anywhere in the world it is cheap, even from the dustbins of the world like the places where foot-and-mouth disease is endemic.

“Them as doesn’t know” have decimated our fishing industry; they’re doing their damnedest to decimate our farming. My old boss would have had a message for them, he would have said “Watch wot thou’s doing or it’ll be ower late to mek it reet”.

Dialect word: Slape clogs, meaning someone not to be trusted.

Thought for the day: Bigotry is being certain of something you know nothing about.