Preventing Rampant Development

The Heritage Party will preserve what is left of the natural beauty of our countryside and our towns and villages, but this requires a drastic reduction in net immigration to protect both rural and urban areas from rampant ‘development’. 

Self-sufficiency in Food

The United Kingdom is already over-populated and dependent on food imports to survive. We should aim to lower our dependency on food imports and ultimately become self-sufficient in food. The United Kingdom has some of the best agricultural land in the world which is a precious resource and should be preserved for agriculture. Despite this, there is huge pressure to concrete over large areas of our countryside to build housing for artificially inflated population growth, or for solar panels and wind turbines to satisfy the false claims of green ideology. This pressure must be resisted.

Green Belt

The Green Belts around London, Birmingham, Manchester and other large cities are a legacy to us from our forefathers to prevent uncontained urban sprawl and to protect our countryside. They are now under threat from interests who care nothing for our heritage, using spurious arguments to justify rampant development in these precious protected areas. The Heritage Party will protect our Green Belt and ban all construction in Green Belt areas.

Hazards

We must ensure that our environment is protected from harmful chemical, biological and radiological hazards. While carbon dioxide is natural, many chemicals used in industry and agriculture have a detrimental impact on our ecosystems. Harmful chemicals which should be kept out of our environment include:

• Neonicotinoids, which are harmful to pollinators and should never be used. 
• Fluoride, which should not be added to the water system. People should not be coerced into drinking fluoride. Adding it to water effectively removes choice from people who wish to avoid it. If people wish to expose themselves to fluoride they can buy and use fluoride toothpaste. 
• Heavy metals and toxic metal compounds, which should not be emitted into the environment at all, including in the process of ‘cloud seeding’. The atmosphere, and thus clouds and rainwater, should not be knowingly laced with lithium, cobalt, silver, barium or aluminium salts or other toxic compounds.
• Glyphosate, which is a suspected carcinogen and persists in the environment where it may cause long-term damage to flora, fauna and ecosystems. It should be replaced with biodegradable and natural alternative weedkillers such as white vinegar and pelargonic acid

Clean Rivers and Seas

The appalling situation of regular sewage overspills in our rivers and seas must be halted. Sewage overspills occur during heavy rainfall because our wastewater system mixes rainwater with sewage. It needs to be replaced with a dual system that separates foul water and surface run off into different pipes, so that excess rainwater will not lead to sewage overspills. We will invest in our wastewater systems to upgrade them to dual systems such as exist in Switzerland and Singapore. 

We will also place a moratorium on building in areas where sewage overspills occur.

Flooding

Flooding is preventable by dredging rivers to remove excess silt and building flood defence walls where necessary.

Flooding is exacerbated by building in flood plains which increases the population in areas prone to flooding. We will halt all construction in flood plains.

5G

5G uses frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum between 3 GHz and 100 GHz that have never been used before for communication. Their effects on human health are unknown. There should be a moratorium on using 5G, or any other new electromagnetic frequencies, before it has been fully and thoroughly tested by independent researchers as to its effects on humans, animals, plants and microbes. It should not be switched on unless it is conclusively proven that it does not cause any adverse health effects.

Solar Dimming

We will ban the spraying of chemicals into the atmosphere that artificially dim the Sun or create unnatural cloud cover.

Self-sufficiency in Food

We currently import about 46% of our food while embarking on schemes that are destroying and degrading farmland. This needs to end. We will set a target to become 100% food self-sufficient within 10 years.

Encouraging Food Production

We will end all subsidies that discourage or prevent farmers from growing food on their land and could lead to farm closures. We shall also end all subsidies for converting agricultural land to wind turbines, solar farms and battery-operated storage systems.

We will pay farmers to produce food, not meet climate targets.

In order to protect domestic food production, we will increase the total annual budget for UK Agriculture by £1bn and restore the value of direct payments to farmers that have been cut by DEFRA. The farm subsidy system should be targeted to support food production and safety, good stewardship of the land and animal welfare, as well as encouraging an increase in organic and free-range farming.

Regenerative Farming

We must return to natural, regenerative farming methods. We will encourage diverse, mixed farming for local needs, with proper crop rotation that regenerates the soil, less reliance on pesticides and herbicides, more hedges and nature land strips, zero genetically modified food, and ethically sourced and produced meat.

The alternative is a continuation of monoculture crop production that degrades the soil and high intensity factory farming in which animals are treated cruelly. This is already being replaced by an even worse and dystopian vision of a future of high-tech, unnatural, AI-automated biomass production with genetically modified food, genome processing, 5G geofencing of farm animals, bug powder and vertical soil-less agriculture under hydroponic lighting that Tony Blair describes as a ‘no farm future’.

Frankenfoods

Our food must continue to be natural and not grown in a laboratory. We will prohibit the production and import of ‘Frankenfoods’ like ‘lab-grown meat’ or insect biomass to prevent them from contaminating our food supply in the UK. 

We will repeal the Precision (Gene) Editing Bill 2022 and we will prohibit the inscription of experimental mRNA technology into our food supply.

Abattoirs

We will re-develop a system of small abattoirs so that local farmers can take animals to slaughter locally. We will reverse regulations that have caused many existing small abattoirs to close.

Meat Imports

We will re-open the state-of-the-art meat checking facility at Dover to prevent the Illegal imports of 1-2 tonnes of unidentified meat (mainly pork) that has been entering UK daily since it was closed, endangering food safety in our nation.

Farming Careers

We will seek to incentivise more British young people to choose farming as a vocation and encourage British students to pick the harvest during their summer holidays to end reliance on foreign labour.

We will deregulate the tracing required on domestic farm animals. This is hugely costly to farmers and provides no discernible benefit.

Sensible Disease Management

We will comprehensively overhaul the currently draconian response to animal diseases, e.g. bird flu and foot and mouth. The destruction of entire flocks and herds for diseases that pose no threat to people is pointless.

Fertiliser Production

It is vital that we are able to produce our own fertiliser in the UK. To this end, we will nationalise the UK’s last remaining ammonia production plant in Billingham, which is currently mothballed, and re-start domestic production of ammonia, which is an essential ingredient in fertiliser manufacturing.

Animal Welfare on Farms

We will improve animal welfare on farms with these actions:

• We will end the practice of keeping egg laying hens in so-called ‘enriched’ cages which are little better than battery cages. All UK produced eggs should be free range or organic.

• All farm animals should have space to move about while they are alive. There should be an end to factory farming where animals are kept in confined conditions for their whole lives. Ultimately, all farm animals should be free range or organic.

• We will ban the intensive farming of fish and other sea creatures where salmon, octopus and other species are kept in dirty, unhygienic and overcrowded conditions for the whole of their lives.

• We will end the export of live animals for slaughter, except from Northern Ireland to the Republic of Ireland.

• There is no pleasant method of slaughtering animals, but in every case, the most humane method must be used for each species.We will ban the practice of non-stun slaughter of cows, sheep and pigs in the UK. 

• All slaughterhouses must be fitted with CCTV, and all slaughtering of animals must be carried out by recognised slaughtermen in a registered slaughterhouse.

• All meat and meat products must be clearly labelled with the method of slaughter. This applies to both domestic and imported meat.

Animal Testing and Cosmetics

We will re-impose a ban on animal testing for cosmetics. and introduce a ban on animal testing for botox and household cleaning products. This is unnecessary as cruelty-free products have been available for some time.

Preventing Cruelty to Animals

We will ban imports of products that have been produced or developed using cruelty to animals.

Stronger deterrents against animal cruelty are needed than exist at present. Crimes against animals should carry a sentence that is a proportion of the same crime if a human were the victim, up to an equivalent sentence for the most sentient animals.

Microchipping Animals

We will repeal the laws requiring dogs, cats and farm animals to be microchipped.

UK Fishing Waters

Our 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone for fishing is a precious resource and our control of it should never have been given up. The UK-EU TCA sold out our fisherman and effectively left us in the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy with little say over quotas in our own waters. We will leave TCA and take full control of our full 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), as is our entitlement under international law, allowing us to rebuild our fishing industry, its ancillary industries, and our coastal towns. 

This maritime zone should be managed responsibly to protect fish stocks while also reducing Britain’s food deficit and revitalising our coastal towns and fishing industry. 

We will stop foreign trawlers, including supertrawlers, from fishing in our waters, except by specific permission, and a fleet of cutters should be commissioned for the Royal Navy to prevent destructive fishing by foreign vessels and super-trawlers in our waters.

We will also end the practice of foreign owners buying and using British flags of convenience, and prohibit the sale of quotas, so only British fishermen in British boats can fish in British waters. Fish caught in British waters must be landed in the UK. This will quickly help to revitalise the fishing industry in our coastal towns and contribute towards self-sufficiency in food.

Ending Destructive Fishing Practices

We will end the practice of ‘bottom trawling’ where nets are dragged along the sea bed causing complete devastation to natural habitat of the sea floor, indiscriminately killing all species of plants and animals alike.

We will end the practice of electric pulse fishing in UK waters.