'This is a battle farmers here need European farmers to win to avoid an urban-dominated Westminster government gold-plating and enforcing the same draconian measures'

Controlling inflation is akin to trying to put an out of control beast back in a cage.

That is becoming clearer by the day at Westminster, with promises to half inflation set to join a long list of broken commitments. The rate for May was again higher than market expectations and the result will be another rise in interest rates – just as happened last month.

Higher interest rates are the default tool to tackle inflation, but it is a crude tool not necessarily targeted at the source of the problem. There are two types of inflation – demand pull and cost push.

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The pull form comes from an overheated economy with demand driving up prices. Push is what we are now facing from higher costs for commodities, including food.

This is harder to control with interest rates, but the Bank of England has no other tools and the government has no fresh radical ideas. Food is now the key driver of the problem and questions need to be asked about why prices are still rising, when farm gate prices for key commodities are falling, so if there are other factors in play, they need to be justified further along the food chain.

Another issue is why food price inflation is easing in Europe, but remains high in the UK. One suggestion has been that European countries produce more of their own food and so are less dependent on imports in a world where Ukraine has made it a sellers' market for globally traded food.

This is a post-Brexit issue the government has failed to grasp and farmers have every right to say 'told you so' as they suffer along with the rest of society for politician's failure to get a grip on inflation or understand even basic economics.

Inflation has diverted political attention from the headlong pursuit of green initiatives for the countryside at the expense of food production. Farmers have more than done their bit to work with the green lobby and explain the true science of countryside management.

Some have listened, but for the most part for farmers it has been a case of Stockholm syndrome, where the captive forges a relationship with their captor, only to ultimately find to their cost this was a one-way relationship.

In the EU, a new policy beyond greening has emerged, known in a triumph for effective PR as nature restoration. This sounds like a motherhood and apple pie issue that no-one could fail to support.

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But there is only one industry set to pay the price for this heaping of green legislation on top of green regulation and that is productive, food producing agriculture. This is EU legislation, but the same words are appearing here and gathering traction in political circles.

Those terms include re-wilding and re-wetting – the latter being a reference to peat bogs and similar land being returned to nature and as a carbon sink for climate change mitigation.

EU legislation is in the offing, but to their credit farmers – through the European farm lobby group COPA – are fighting back. This legislation has to be agreed between the European Commission and European Parliament and it is there farmers are using their muscle and logic to turn the tables on Brussels.

This has become a very dirty fight, with COPA even accusing the commission of blackmail tactics to force MEPs to accept the case for legislation. The suggestion is that opposing it will be seen by their constituents as at attack on the environment, when in reality it is Brussels green obsession that is being criticised.

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The farming lobby won its arguments in the parliament's agriculture committee; now is has split the environment committee down the middle. Everything is still to play for and the debate has been widened to include issues around food security, affordability and local sourcing.

The farming lobby is forcing Brussels to acknowledge it does not have a blank cheque from European citizens to pursue a green agenda, regardless of the consequences for society in general and those who live and work in Europe's rural areas.

This is a battle farmers here need European farmers to win to avoid an urban-dominated Westminster government gold-plating and enforcing the same draconian measures. There is no certainty COPA will win its battle but after years on the back foot in this debate it is great to see farmers landing some impressive punches on an opponent that believes it speaks for the general public without any proof that is the case.