Another week, another record high for food price inflation.

It hit 12.4% this week and while there are some signs overall inflation is easing, no-one expects an early drop in food prices. This time it was led by eggs, meat and dairy products.

This reflects higher costs on farms and along the food chain, not least fuel and wages for distributing products. It also reflects some impact from bird flu, which has prompted headlines claiming there will be a shortage of turkeys and that many families will not be able to afford Christmas dinner.

It is wrong to seek to lay the blame at the door of farmers. They are passing on higher costs, but do not control this process and the costs being passed on are not the full impact being felt on farms.

There is also a less palatable and harder to get across message around food. People need to adjust their priorities, back to the views of our past generation that saw their first priority as putting food on the table.

In an age of rising inflation, food spending has to be prioritised again. There is no way to avoid food price inflation, but other things can be cut back on with minimal pain to ensure nutritious food – and a good Christmas dinner – are on family tables.

This is important, but some other things are not when times are tight, as they are now, and these should go long before healthy, nutritious food.

The EU is in the middle of a cumbersome exercise addressing what are the drivers of food security. This is not easy and every commission directorate and lobby group is seeking to have their views included.

In theory, the answer should be simple – food security comes from allowing farmers to be more productive and to produce more food from the land they farm. This is no different to the Jonathan Swift philosophy in the 1700s around the importance of growing two blades of grass where one grew before.

Give farmers the right signals and they will respond quickly to the challenge of delivering European or national food security. They have done so before and are well placed to do so again – but what is making the process cumbersome in Europe is that it is now tied up with politics – and specifically green politics.

As this battle rages, it is interesting that a former head of MI5 – and one of the first in that job with a public profile – Eliza Manningham-Buller, this week emphasised the important of national food security. Delivering the Lord Plumb memorial lecture, she said home grown food production was integral to national security.

That is the sort of political views we need to be hearing from a member of the House of Lords and it is a view with which Lord Plumb would wholly have agreed. It is a very obvious message, but one that politicians at Westminster, of any party, simply do not seem to understand.

Instead, they are influenced by focus groups and social media telling them if they want to be loved by the electorate, they will have to go even greener. This is not just a criticism of Westminster politicians – it is equally true of the EU, although there are some voices in the European Parliament warning of the dangers in making wrong choices between food security and a green agricultural Nirvana.

This came to a head during a discussion on its compulsory nature restoration policy makers, as part of the EU Green Deal to drive down carbon output. Farm ministers had warned that restoring nature and improving biodiversity, ahead of productive agriculture, would have consequences for food security.

The commission insist restoring nature can co-exist with productivity and food security. In an angry outburst, the environment commissioner claimed the war in Ukraine and its impact on food production could no longer be an excuse for failure to make progress on this key aspect of the 'green deal'.

This is no different to the stance of UK politicians, who continually fail to see the potential of agriculture to deliver for the economy in a post-Brexit era where European policies no longer have to be followed.

Despite food price inflation that potential is not being delivered. The government is committed to the same policies farmers would have faced in Europe, but without the financial security of the CAP.

By any standards that can only be judged a policy failure.