The Buteman has now published a story on its website – and which will be published in its newspaper this week. It looks at the reactions in Bute to the news that local farmer and newly-elected Liberal Democrat MEP, George Lyon, is giving up the tenancies of his three farms on the island. Mr Lyon’s farm staff are facing an unexpectedly insecure future and Mr Lyon is retaining for himself, ‘within the rules’, the Single Farm Payment/s (SFPs) granted in respect of the operations of the farm/s.

SFPs are a European Union subsidy paid by Scotland, oddly to the farmer and not tied to the farm they are designed to support. This means that a farmer going out of farming can legally keep the subsidies which are granted for a period of years – in this case until 2012 when new arrangements will come in. The money involved is significant. We have been told by one source that in Mr Lyon’s case the subsidy he may retain until 2012 will be tens of thousands of pounds.

It has to be said that, whatever the sums involved, it is distasteful for a politician to deploy ‘the rules’ to his advantage, especially when he is about to set off on the biggest gravy train of them all – the European Parliament; and when the farms to which the subsidy related will be left bereft of that substantial support.

The issues being raised with us in our previous articles related to this matter – and with The Buteman in its piece, include:

• questions about the political impact on his election if Mr Lyon’s planned moves in this respect had been known before people cast their votes. Mr Lyon has made it public that he agreed with his landlord, the Mount Stuart Trust, three months ago in April this year, that he would relinquish his farm tenancies this November. The Buteman’s article quotes his farm manager as being told only three weeks ago, after the election on 4th June, that he would be out of a job.
• questions of moral propriety in the same vein as the general public’s current questioning of Westminster MPs on their expenses. The issue is one of taking personal benefit ‘within the rules’ where the intention of the rules is clearly at odds with the action taken.
• questions of judgment reflecting on the Liberal Democrat party in its choice of a candidate who already had a chequered public record in other fields such as animal cruelty.

For Argyll is of course, concerned with the current low standards obtaining in political life but the main thrust of our articles has been with the need to reform the way Scotland handles the transmission of Single Farm Payments (SFPs). We have welcomed Cabinet Secretar for Rural Affairs, Richard Lochhead’s initiative in establishing an enquiry to address the situation.

The Buteman has a more local take on the matter, setting it in its context of an island to which agriculture and those who work on the land are a key element of island life. Well worth reading online or in print this week.

Related Posts

• Lochhead’s Enquiry into EU Single Farm Payment and issues raised by George Lyon MEP on his own intentions (1)
• Lochhead sets up inquiry into Single Farm Payment to position Scotland well in coming CAP negotiations (4)
• New Lib Dem MEP, George Lyon, in farming mysteries and clarifications (1)
• Support for new entrants to farming in Bute Estate’s lettings (2)
• This week For Argyll sees Sunday Herald pick up a story, Guardian reference another and Clydeport play the lawyers’ letter move (1)

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