"Is Your Man Getting Enough?"

Those of you old enough may remember the above as a slogan of the Milk Marketing Board, along with “milk's gotta lotta bottle” and "drinka pinta milka day". This really is left field stuff you are thinking, well yes it is. Why I am thinking about milk, well firstly on our local news programme they featured a group of farmers meeting to complain to the Agriculture Minister about the price that they were getting for milk at the farm gate. It featured lots of pictures of contented cows and the inside of a high tech bottling plant. To be honest I had forgotten about this until I drove past the vast milk processing plant of ARLA foods on the outskirts of Leeds yesterday. A bonus point for those who know that ARLA foods are a Danish/Swedish company who among other things produces Lurpack butter.

Now the Milk Marketing Board was one of those arms length government agencies created after the last war to stabilise vital supplies, if my memory serves me correctly there was also one for potatoes and perhaps fish. Probably nobody much noticed when it was abolished in 1994 as one of the last flourishes of the Thatcherism in the UK. I cannot remember but maybe the farmers at the time thought that it was suppressing prices. Indeed immediately after the abolition of the MMB milk prices rose due to competition, but as we have found in other privatisations the competing companies soon merged leaving three major players in the market. Certainly looking at the political map of Britain as a Conservative policy it was what the farmers had voted for!!!

Now however the law of unintended consequences is impacting the farmers, back in 1994 the big supermarkets were not as dominant, the local milkman was still making his daily deliveries, and globalisation was something that futurologists were discussing. Nobody had ever thought that things like milk would be traded essentially as financial instruments. So here are conservative farmers asking a Conservative government for state intervention or even involving the EU. Well, well, whatever would Humphrey (look that one up) have thought about it?