That society has a safety net is both obvious and wondrous. That folk don’t need to depend upon it is even better:

New green farming subsidies are failing to attract large numbers of farmers, who are instead focusing on food production.

Just 1,000 farmers are signed up to the most basic part of the new £2.4 billion environmental land management scheme (Elms), which will replace the old EU-style subsidies.

The number of farmers signed up to the scheme, which opened in June, is just 1.6 per cent of the Government’s target of participants by 2028.

So there is some scheme to make sure that farmers are not reduced to having to eat their own turnips. Great, we’ve no problem with that safety net. We also insist that it’s even better that very few of them seem to require - except as that insurance - that safety net. They’ve more productive things to be doing with their time and assets. Wondrous.

Except, of course, people are complaining about this. Plans are afoot to increase the sign up. Which is ludicrous.

Think on it. We have unemployment pay to provide a safety net to those who can find no productive use of their time and assets. It’s righteous that we should have such. But we measure success by how few people need to depend upon that, not by how many. We most certainly don’t go out to improve society by insisting that more should qualify for unemployment pay.

Yet here they are, complaining that farmers are being productive by producing food. Then insisting that they must stop doing that, immediately, and live off taxpayer handouts instead.

But then we’ve long remarked on the Establishment’s ability to firmly grasp the wrong end of that ordured stick.