Malcolm Cupis is a public relations consultant, strategist and writer. He stood as a Reform UK candidate in 2024 and was a constituency chairman. He resigned from Reform UK in February 2025
Over the weekend I read about the prosecution of a farmer in Cornwall which really drove home the degree to which they are currently being targeted by the state.
Before I get to the detail let me just say that I live in rural Wiltshire and I know a lot of farmers, some of whom I grew up with and have known pretty much all my life. The degree to which they are struggling to survive at the moment, in the face of a relentless tide of legislative attack, cannot be understated. The personal effect this has on them is terrible.
Farming is not just a job and not merely even a vocation.
It demands 24 hour, 365 days a year commitment, in all weather conditions and often in absolute isolation. It is relentlessly physically and mentally exhausting. Which explains why so many farmers are killed or seriously injured every year. 20 per cent of the UK’s workplace fatalities last year took place on farms. Farmers are also vastly over-represented in suicide statistics. If you know farmers this comes as no surprise – not just because of the constant pressure to meet ever more intrusive and demanding regulation, but also because their farms are central to their whole lives.
You never leave the office if you are a farmer. Never. And many feel the pressure of keeping their farms afloat in a way that normal people cannot comprehend. The farms have invariably been established by generations of toil. Their ancestors commonly have worked themselves to death, quite literally, and they carry that legacy and that responsibility. They cannot contemplate being the one that lets down generations of ancestors by giving up and making it all for nothing.
The Health and Safety Executive sent out a press release last week announcing it had successfully prosecuted Cornish farmer Beverly Chapman, for “failing to take action after walkers were attacked by cattle with calves on a public footpath”.
A 75-year-old man had suffered serious injuries after being “suddenly attacked” by a suckling herd while walking his dog on the footpath – designated as part of the South West Coastal Path. The press release states that the farmer was told about the cattle attack on the same day but that “rather than removing the cattle and calves from the South West Coast Path, she added more cattle and calves to the herd to increase its size”.
A month later two dog walkers in the same place were also “attacked” – they were not injured but one of their dogs required surgery. The farmer then removed the cattle “when instructed to do so by a Cornwall Council public rights of way officer”.
In the subsequent prosecution the farmer was fined £5,260 and ordered to pay prosecution costs of £4,650 and a court surcharge of £2,000 at Bristol Magistrates’ Court on 16 December 2025.
Let me make clear I do not know Beverly Chapman and I do not know about the further specific details of what took place. What I am certain of is that she will be fighting to survive, just like all other farmers are, and the last thing she will want is to be involved in something like this or to be fined that amount of money.
What strikes me is who is standing up for her? Who is helping her or arguing the case for her? Nobody, so far as I can see, other than me.
Last summer was a disaster for farmers, not just because of the change of government but also because of the weather. All the livestock farmers I know had to work desperately hard to feed their animals, which had to be constantly rotated on parched, grassless pastures. They put their animals where they had to put them, when they had to put them there.
This footpath crosses a livestock farm. It is Beverly Chapman’s factory floor. It is her farm. Her land. The public right of way allows people to walk across it on a three foot wide path. It could well be that this field was the only one available to the farmer at that time that supported her cattle.
That is before the problem of entitled tourists and walkers leaving gates open, lighting fires which quickly get out of control, leaving litter, broken glass and dog crap everywhere, vandalising gates, fences and troughs and stealing farm equipment, which are things all the farmers I know have to continually contend with.
On top of everything else we now have a government quango that has nothing to do with farming that is treating farms like factories and livestock like machinery. Fining farmers for failing to comply with health and safety legislation that forces them not to be able to legally farm on their own farmland, so that people who want to use it for their leisure are given priority.
It is quite clear the Government is deliberately targeting farmers with policies designed to destroy them and it is hard not to conclude that it does this because it wants to seize the land so that it can cover it in Chinese solar panels and windmills, and build lots of houses for people who are desperate to sell up and leave the cities that have been turned into overcrowded lawless hellholes.
Farmers being forced out of business and farmland given over to renewable energy and housing ensures we then become ever more dependent on importing food instead of growing it ourselves, so we completely lose control of our own food production and supply or pricing.
And who is standing up not just for the farmer, but the whole putrid political cycle that has enabled this situation and perpetuates it? I’m sad to say that the Conservative Party conspicuously failed to do that in its years in government and Nigel Farage may turn up at a hunt in a jaunty hat and talk a tough game, but up until now he has come up with absolutely nothing that suggests any kind of recognition of the true state of the problem, let alone any solutions.
