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New allegiances2

Britain is governed in the name of the Crown, but the Queen meets her Lords and Commons only on symbolic occasions such as the ceremonial State Opening of Parliament. In practice, procedures ensure that legislative power is firmly in the hands of the Commons, although in principle both Houses must approve the measure proposed. The Queen follows the advice of the Prime Minister - the leader of the political group (party) able to command a majority vote in the Commons, and which forms the Government. As a member of the European Community, Britain also sends 81 elected representatives (MEPs) to sit in the European Parliament, and recognizes certain types of legislation passed there.

As it happens, about 70 per cent of the EEC budget goes to subsidize farm and food prices. And about the same percentage of Britain's total land area is farmed. Of a total of 243 000 farms and holdings, about half provide full-time work for only one person, while 31 000 larger farms account for half the total agricultural output, which topped US$16 billion in. 1983 - around 2.3 per cent of the Gross National Product (GNP). Fewer than 700 000 people work in agriculture, less than 3 per cent of the national workforce.

Some of their products helped to swell the EEC's colossal agricultural surpluses, in butter, beef, grain and milk powder. EEC support policies have encouraged large-scale crop growing and, to accommodate ever larger machines, thousands of kilometers of hedges, ditches and ancient boundaries have been bulldozed and deep-ploughed into oblivion. Some modern farms, fully mechanized to eliminate the farm worker, have begun to resemble factories an unlovely cluster of steel and concrete buildings, silage towers and sheds.

Perhaps fortunately, relatively little of Britain's landscape lends itself to large-scale operations of this nature, and mounting public concern about its environmental and ecological consequences is beginning to exert political pressure. Indeed, much of Britain's farming remains on more traditional lines. In the mountainous, rain-swept west and north, and their green-pastured, river-laced borderlands, pastoral farming predominates, with sheep grazing the hillsides and cattle browsing the lush meadows, as they have done for 1000 years and more. The lowlands of the south and east, sheltered from the rain of an Atlantic climate by the western highlands, have always favored crop growing. Wheat, barley, potatoes and vegetables are harvested from soils, which are richer and deeper than those of highland Britain.

Across the scarped uplands and clay vales of southern England the imprint of nearly 2000 years of cultivation can still be seen. Chalk downs bear the marks, however faint, of terraces (lynchets) farmed by early Iron Age people, as on Salisbury Plain and near the Uffington White Horse in Oxfordshire. Near Northleigh in the same county, a Romano-British village is surrounded by relics of the ridges and furrows of medieval communal cultivation.

Next: Eras of change