The Agri Brigade: Another pisspoor Private Eye column

Pseuds Corner isn't the only poor column in Private Eye: I was pleased to see the current issue has another letter from a reader criticising The Agri Brigade.

If the Eye has an, if you will, eyedeology, it is centred on opposition to the way big business is given vast sums of public money with little or no accountability for how it is spent. 

Yet this principle is reversed when it comes to agriculture, as The Agri Brigade is devoted to the idea that farming should be subsidised and that no one outside the business should criticise what farmers do.

It reminds me of the late Sir Richard Body's account of fighting a hopeless industrial seat for the Conservatives in 1950. He was taken to meet some farmers on the rural fringe of the constituency for a briefing on agriculture.

There he was told the line to take: British farming is the most efficient in the world, and that's why it deserves to be subsidised.

Ian Hislop inherited The Agri Brigade from Richard Ingrams when he took over as editor. If I remember rightly, under Ingrams it gave the point of view of small farmers - the National Farmers Union was seen as the voice of big farmers and referred to as No F***ing Use.

That touch of radicalism has been lost and these days it may as well be written by the NFU. Nor has it been free of the original sin of the Eye: public school snobbery. I remember The Agri Brigade finding Margaret Beckett's love of caravan holidays endlessly amusing.

I'd like to see an environmental column in the Eye that was written with the public good in mind, rather than the interests of one industry.

But then, as I have bought every issue of the Eye since I went to York in 1978 (you couldn't buy it in Market Harborough in those days), I feel I'm entitled to moan about it from time to time.