Labour’s war on sheep needs to end

Does Angela Rayner have a beef about lamb? The Deputy Prime Minister has joined the Labour Government’s mission to make farmers graze fewer sheep. Having taken over responsibility for wildfires, she has joined Defra in its obsession with reducing livestock emissions to meet Ed Miliband’s net zero targets. Sheep numbers have been artificially reduced, causing dry vegetation to accumulate and turning vast tracts of countryside into a tinderbox.

Ms Rayner should listen to those who really understand our rural ecology: hill farmers (such as James Rebanks, author of English Pastoral) and the Moorland Association. The latter has appealed to her to halt the campaign against sheep, which is destroying ancient farming practices and making wildfires on the scale of Los Angeles more likely. Seven years ago, wildfires in the Manchester region caused pollution that afflicted millions. Now fire chiefs have warned that conflagrations due to lack of grazing and land management are increasing. This is an environmental and human disaster waiting to happen.

The official prejudice against sheep is unwarranted. It seems to be inspired by zealots like George Monbiot, who claim that overgrazing by “the white plague” has ruined our uplands – ignoring the evidence that sheep-farming has been an integral part of English agriculture for centuries. No less arbitrary is the talk of carbon emissions. Why single out sheep, merely because they are visible, rather than animals kept out of sight on intensive megafarms?

On these islands we are particularly good at rearing sheep. Last year, the Welsh flock stood at 8.4 million, or a little over 2.6 sheep per person. Even these prodigious numbers are down from their peak – there were more than 12 million in the 1990s. There remain around 70 per cent more sheep in Wales than the entire United States, a country over 470 times larger. Ovines do very little harm and a great deal of good.

Elsewhere, sheep grazing is not seen as a cause of climate change, but a prophylactic against its effects. Ms Rayner should take wildfires seriously, rein in Defra and get behind this British success story. How about lamb for lunch, Deputy Prime Minister?