As your Member of Parliament may I begin by wishing all residents of North Dorset a very happy and successful, stress-free 2026. I hope you had an enjoyable Christmas and opportunity to recharge the batteries ready for the year ahead.
We are perhaps too often told that society/community is at best dwindling if not dying. I think this is a gross exaggeration and what binds us together is best illustrated at Christmas. The organisers of the multiple carol services, organists, readers and choirs. The volunteers who help check in on our elderly or veterans. The Lions, Rotary, RBL and Probus members who rattle a collecting tin for a range of good causes. To those who collect gifts to dispense to those in need. For all who make a special charity donation to help the vulnerable. Our health workers, emergency blue light services and our military who put their sense of duty to their communities first and sacrifice precious family time in the doing. To all of them an enormous and heartfelt thank you. What you do is not just precious it is so important as it reminds us that “no man is an island, entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main”.
This new year is going to be an important one for rural Britain. From my conversations with pub landlords, we are clearly as close to breaking point as we ever have been. The Chancellor is going to have to get her thinking cap on and create innovative solutions if our village pubs are to survive. I am lobbying for a reduction in VAT for hospitality. Life without a pub in the vicinity providing as it does a meeting place for locals is a dark prospect indeed, but too many publicans are telling me that is what is in prospect. Treasury too is going to have to rethink the Family Farm Tax. It needs to realise that there are ways of raising revenue but taxing the family farm to extinction is not one of them. The Government appears spectacularly tin eared on the impact of this policy. In the Commons, when I raised the early-induced death of an elderly farming constituent in order to save the family farm from the tax man I was met with the most emotionally desiccated response imaginable. No compassion or empathy merely Treasury-speak. The same too when the Prime Minister was cross examined at the recent Liaison Committee meeting in the Commons. My chin dropped when I heard him reply to a question about farmer suicide that he was aware but had no plans to change. We need to make 2026 the year when urban Britain understands rural Britain and its importance to our landscape, heritage, environment, economy but above all FOOD SECURITY. Without the ability to feed ourselves we are nothing.
