ABSTRACT
In Britain, since 1945, the state has assumed an unprecedented degree of responsibility for the functioning and welfare of agriculture. A close and wide-ranging partnership has grown up in which the Government has provided agriculture with a high degree of support and protection, and agriculture has accepted in return an unusual amount of supervision and regulation. This chapter discusses the difficult problems of state support and guidance to agriculture which were hidden beneath the generalized phraseology of the Agriculture Act. The Agriculture Act set the general goals for state policy, but left most of the details to be settled by administrative action. The chapter shows that the ‘stability’ and the ‘efficiency’ propounded by the Agriculture Act are far from simple concepts. The circumstances of British agriculture set the background against which the post-war experiment in agricultural ‘partnership’ was to be played out.
