Nick Joy: The world order has changed
I don’t suppose that anyone has difficulty with the title of this piece, though there are many who would berate me for suggesting that Trump has changed the world.
My support or bias for Trump is primarily because of two things. Firstly, he says what he is going to do and does it, and secondly, because he is dealing with corruption and fraud on a massive scale.
There is of course the other thing which is that he has made the people who elected him his priority, the American people. I look forward to people attacking me because he is withdrawing support from Ukraine but I would like them to remind me how long it took to get the USA to join the Second World War.
Despite what he has been doing, he is the last person on earth I would like to have to my house for dinner as I feel he is a deeply unlikeable person. I don’t mix up likeability with leading a country well.
So this brings me back to the insanity of this country, where how likeable or supposedly decent you are should decide whether you run the country. For all of those of us involved in rural business, the current government would have you believe that they are people of deep conscience and decency. I am not going to argue with that. They may or may not be, but would you hire them at interview to run a business? I wouldn’t, because they don’t understand the principles of investment nor the prime drivers of successful business.
Rural business is under even greater pressure than it has been for some time, precisely because this government is trying to virtue signal to the radicals in this country. For both agriculture and aquaculture, the future is looking tougher and tougher. There will be more legislation, more regulatory burdens and more civil servants, monitoring your business. They will give credence to so-called experts and activists over those who actually do the business, at the same time as increasing tax on business and through that, employees.
What it will take for businesses in the rural environment to stand up and resist? At what point will we all say: “Enough”? Agriculture has had a pretty supportive public for a long time. Aquaculture has had to put up with some of the most radical, misleading liars attacking the industry. What will it take for us to stand up and challenge the government properly? Or do we secretly believe that the activists are right?
The truth about sea lice
I have always believed that sea lice are not a significant cause of the decline of sea trout and salmon in the wild. It’s not just that I have seen wild salmon, netted on the east coast, bleeding off their backs from over 100 gravid female lice. Nor is it that no-one can find the juvenile lice despite all of their modelling. Nor even that the decline matches on east and west coasts, which it has since the 1960s. It is simply that it makes no sense for a fish, adapted over millennia, not to have a strategy against a parasite which has always hung about in the estuaries. It never made any sense and it still doesn’t.
So now we are starting to hear that the traffic light system in Norway is not improving the lot of wild salmonids. Are they going to review whether they got it right? Apparently not, as they are talking about making it even more draconian. The more government uses “experts” and statistical modellers, the more they are going to get it wrong but at what point is the industry going to cry: “Enough”? The industry has been proven guilty without any evidence. There is plenty of theory but almost no evidence. So why are we allowing it to happen? This is not like fertiliser run-off in agriculture where controls were based on evidence.
Surely it is time to use the law to challenge the grounds behind this attempt to control the industry, by using statistical models as though they were fact. If we do not, I fear for where we will end up.
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