Britain’s new farming minister fainted at the sight of meat as he toured a food processing plant, a report claims, as the country’s new left-wing Prime Minister tries to win over farmers the previous government relentlessly attacked.
Stephen Morgan, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs — otherwise known as the ‘farming minister’ — a junior minister in the new Andy Burnham government is reported to have taken a queer turn when touring agricultural sites to help him familiarise himself with his new job. Britain’s best-selling newspaper The Sun cites a farmer familiar with the incident, and who said Morgan was being shown around a meat processing plant to learn how food is made, and was taken ill when shown a storage room.
The refrigerated room was said to be filled with “shelves of meat from slaughtered cattle” at a food processing plant in the Lake District, a National Park in north-west England’s Cumbria, and he allegedly fainted “at the sight of meat”.
The unnamed farmer told the paper: “He’d been shown large chunks of beef as well as some steaks but then he felt faint. He said something like, ‘I don’t feel too well — I need a moment’… It’s not a great look for the farming minister to faint at the sight of meat.”
Left-wing farming boss Morgan played down the incident and said he’d merely struggled with the sudden change of temperature from Britain’s summer outdoors, to the chilled locker. The paper states he said of his conduct: “I felt unwell moving between the extreme heat and cold storage, and I’m grateful to all the staff at Lake District Farmers. Hats off to the brilliant people working in these conditions and temperatures to keep the nation fed.”
While the incident, if it did play out as claimed, may be shocking it should not be surprising, given Morgan’s unfamiliarity with where the nation’s food comes from was already remarked upon when he was appointed to his promotion last month, with the coming of the Burnham government. Trade publication Scottish Farmer splashed the headline “Morgan takes farming brief despite lacking agricultural background” in June when he commenced a junior role in the department, and writing: “The appointment is already attracting attention across the industry, not only because of the scale of the challenges facing farmers, but because Mr Morgan arrives in the role with no direct farming background and after supporting the government’s controversial inheritance tax reforms… his appointment continues a long-running trend of ministers arriving at Defra without direct farming experience.”
The fainting episode comes as Britain’s Prime Minister Andy Burnham acknowledges there is bad blood between farmers and the government and that he has to “win” their trust back. This follows the previous government, under the same Labour Party but led by former Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, which seemed ready to go to war with the countryside to push through left-wing policies are practically any cost. Westminster became the scene of repeated European-style tractor protests, with London’s streets clogged with hundreds of tractors turned out against insidious tax raids on family farms, which critics said would ensure no farm could survive death duties, preventing them from being passed to the next generation.
Farmers rallied against “Starmer the Farmer Harmer”, and a spokesman said at one such protest last year: “This Labour policy will kill British farming and kill our food security. We can’t be dependent on other countries. They’re completely out of touch. Farmers, the working class, the National Insurance hikes – it’s killing everyone.”
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