PROTESTS AGAINST FREE-TRADE AGREEMENT WITH LATIN AMERICA CAP WEEKS OF DISCONTENT IN SOUTHERN EUROPE ~ from Contre-Attaque ~ Dramatic images emerged from Brussels yesterday (18 December) as thousands of farmers converged on the Belgian capital with their tractors starting at 2:00 AM, and lit fires in front of the European Parliament. They were protesting the Mercosur agreement, which was being discussed at the Council of the European Union, bringing together the heads of EU member states. Mercosur is a free trade agreement that will further pit European farmers against Latin American agribusiness, which operates without regard for regulations and relies on vast industrial farms that devour forests. Clashes outside Parliament continued for much of the day: potatoes and fireworks were thrown against tear gas and water cannons. Police charged the farmers, some of whom responded by driving their tractors towards the police lines. An EU building was targeted. At the end of the day, a forceful charge dispersed the protesters. https://cdn.freedomnews.org.uk/news/2025/12/signal-2025-12-18-211814.mp4 This anger is international: Greece has been paralysed since 30 November 30th by tens of thousands of farmers who are blocking roads, ports, and airports to demand the release of CAP subsidies. Serious clashes have occurred with the police. In France, protests continue against the policy of culling livestock, but more generally to express the despair of a sacrificed profession. Numerous blockades severely disrupted traffic in the Southwest yesterday. Some farmers have vowed to continue the movement, including through the holidays. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Video: Contre-Attaque montage from Brut, Luc Auffret, Le Monde, local press The post Brussels: European farmers clash with police appeared first on Freedom News.

GREECE’S FARMERS ARE ESCALATING PROTESTS FROM ROAD BLOCKADES TO OPEN CONFRONTATION AS GOVERNMENT RESPONDS WITH REPRESSION ~ Blade Runner ~ After more than ten days of nationwide mobilisation, farmers’ protests last week escalated into open confrontation and clashes with riot police. Protesters have faced arrests and upgraded charges, while in Crete authorities are threatening to prosecute farmers under accusations of forming a “criminal organisation.” From the mountains of Macedonia and Epirus to the plains of Thessaly and Aitoloakarnania, and from olive-growing Messinia to tourist-heavy Crete, thousands of low- and lower-middle-income farmers have taken to the roads. National highways have been shut down, cutting key transport routes and effectively splitting the country into parts. Tractor convoys are marching through major towns and cities, border crossings, ports and airports have been occupied for hours, and state institutions have been targeted with militant interventions. The farmers’ movement has moved decisively beyond symbolic protest. Mainstream media coverage has been sensationalist, with repeated references to “lawlessness” and occasional headlines warning of “insurrection”. This framing supports a broader state narrative that seeks to manipulate the meaning of the protests and brand farmers who confront police repression as “criminals”. Government officials, echoed by media commentators, recycle the familiar distinction between the “good” and the “bad” or “violent” protester. This escalation is unfolding under a centre-right government that includes figures with far-right political backgrounds and rhetoric, and is already facing corruption scandals. Having treated farmers’ representatives with open contempt and unable to address the substance of their demands, ministers have instead threatened prosecutions and expanded policing, signalling a strategy of repression rather than negotiation. Trade unions, youth and local communities have expressed solidarity with the farmers, while anarchist and left-wing groups have actively intervened in support of the mobilisations. The farmers are beginning to break out of isolation and a broader social bloc could be taking shape, capable of undermining the current social peace. RESTRUCTURING THE COUNTRYSIDE The farmers’ revolt cannot be understood outside the long-term restructuring of the Greek countryside under EU and domestic policy. Agriculture in Greece has declined sharply as a share of total employment over recent decades. Around the time Greece joined the European Community in 1981, roughly 30% of the labour force worked in agriculture. Today, that figure stands at around 11–12%, reflecting long-term structural shifts in the economy and population. Successive governments, implementing EU policy, have oriented the Greek economy towards tourism, services and real estate. The country has been reshaped into a low-cost destination for northern and western European capital, while primary production has been hollowed out. Large parts of the rural periphery have been abandoned, with more than a third of the 10 million population living in the Athens metropolitan and wider Attica region. Under the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), remaining farming communities have been steered away from diverse and resilient cultivation towards monoculture systems reliant on subsidy regimes and fixed pricing. This shift has heightened ecological vulnerability and locked farmers into dependence on incentives and fluctuating markets. The so-called green transition has further distorted the sector. Farmers are now required to adopt “environmentally friendly” fertilisers and other inputs at significantly higher cost, while fuel and electricity prices continue to rise. At the same time, Greek agricultural products are forced to compete with cheaper imports from outside the EU, frequently produced under far weaker environmental and labour standards but still granted access to European markets. Against the backdrop of escalating imperialist wars, the EU’s decision to divert resources into rearmament programmes such as ReArm Europe signals a further contraction of support for agricultural production. The combined effect has been the steady destruction of small-scale farming. Production costs have soared, while climate breakdown has intensified extreme weather events, creating a vicious cycle that is now erupting openly. Floods in recent years have wiped out entire villages along with whole harvests and, in some cases, rendered land unproductive for multiple seasons. Compensation has been slow, partial or entirely absent, pushing many farmers deeper into debt. At the centre of the current crisis lies the domestic distribution of agricultural subsidies. Networks of intermediaries extract profit from both producers and consumers, while state mechanisms channel public money towards large landowners and agribusiness. In practice, EU subsidies function as a mechanism of class redistribution: a small minority of large landowners and producers absorbs the vast majority of funds, while small and medium farmers remain trapped in a regime of dependency. Fictitious entitlements, weak oversight and clientelist networks ensure that public resources flow upwards. In Crete, these dynamics are particularly stark. Long-standing patronage networks link political power, land ownership and access to EU incentives. In recent months, violent confrontations between rival family networks—reportedly involving heavy gunfire—have exposed how competition over land and subsidies is mediated through intimidation and force. Far from isolated incidents, these clashes reveal the underlying logic of a system that concentrates power and resources in the hands of a few while abandoning the majority. A STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL AND DIGNITY The farmers’ revolt is unfolding within a wider cycle of social conflict. In France, farmers blocked part of the A64 highway in December 2025 in protest against livestock culling policies, while earlier in 2024 Spanish and French unions organised tractor blockades at border crossings around the Pyrenees. In Portugal, farmers used tractors to block roads linking to Spain during Europe-wide protests. At the same time, recent months have seen waves of strikes and confrontations over wages, living costs and public services in Italy, Bulgaria, Spain and Portugal. Across these different contexts, struggles are increasingly turning towards disruptive tactics that target circulation—from port blockades by farmers to actions in solidarity with Gaza aimed at halting weapons shipments and challenging Israeli military tourism—developments that have been met, across cases, with intensified repression. In Greece, the memory of past uprisings looms large. The debt crisis of the previous decade never truly ended; it reshaped Greek society through austerity, privatisation and mass emigration. The Tempi rail disaster of 2023, which killed 57 people after years of neglect and privatisation of the railway network, remains a stark reminder of the human cost of neoliberal restructuring. Against this backdrop, the ruling class is acutely aware that renewed social explosions are possible. The farmers’ demands are concrete and rooted in material survival. Alongside full compensation for climate-related disasters, they are calling for reductions in production costs, debt relief, tax reductions, a genuinely public and effective national insurance system, equal rights for land workers, dignified pensions and stable income. These demands cut directly against the core of EU agricultural policy and the interests of agribusiness capital, as they appear incompatible with the dominant neoliberal model of global commerce. The state’s response—repression, criminalisation and propaganda—aims to isolate the farmers and prevent the emergence of a wider social challenge. Yet the scale and persistence of the mobilisations suggest that something deeper is unfolding. The farmers’ revolt is not a single sector’s dispute, but a struggle over who bears the cost of climate breakdown and capitalist restructuring. As farmers take to the streets with their tractors, the question confronting Greek society is not only whether agriculture can survive under the existing model, but whether converging struggles can reopen the possibility of a collective rupture with it. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Photos: World Riots on Facebook The post Farmers’ revolt in Greece appeared first on Freedom News.

WITH AGRI-BUSINESSES UP IN ARMS ABOUT THE REMOVAL OF A 2031 CUTOFF FOR RIGHTS OF WAY REGISTRATION, IT’S TIME TO DITCH THE IDEA AND EMBRACE THE RIGHT TO ROAM ~ Rob Ray ~ My dad’s just pulled on his boots and donned his favoured winter flat cap, ready to take Dolly the dog for a quick post-Christmas walk round the fields that surround their village. There’s a dozen paths that carry him, squelchily, away from the house and Dolly could probably walk them all without him, but they both like the company.  It’s a very normal place, this village, as far as the English conception of normal goes. Nestled at the crossroads of a half-dozen small farms, there’s a slim tarmac road leading in one direction to a high-speed feeder towards the towns, or in the other, down winding tracks to nearby villages. A connected place, but rural and stuffed full of the middle classes, who often scoff at towns and cities (especially London) as being noisy, dangerous, somewhat alien.  As a normal village, it has normal farmers. Which is why my dad, who has lived in the same spot for more than 30 years, has stories of villagers clashing with them. Depending on the farmer (they are not, much as Farage and the National Farmers Union like to pretend, all of a mind), they can sometimes be obliging about dogs and their pals taking a given path, or they can turn the whole thing into a contest of wills. Sometimes residents are okay but visitors are not, or longtime residents have a sort of grandfathered-in, unofficial easement where New Folk don’t. And sometimes the same path, turned over from one generation to another or bought out, can go from obliging to contested overnight.  An example of this happened to my parents’ village when a farmer passed on the old stead a few years back. There’s a shortcut at the edge of a field, next to a copse of trees, which connects two bits of Officially Walkable footpath together. People have been crossing over it for donkey’s years. The new farmer, however, was not a fan of walkers in general and on this stretch in particular, so first of all up went the signs. No Access. These wound up in a nearby hedge. Then there were the wildflowers, planted alongside another sign. Rare Flowers, Do Not Trample. There was trampling. Next was the mysteriously sudden appearance of a thistle thicket, which dogs understandably don’t want to walk through. I kicked a few of those to death myself as Dolly gingerly picked her way around them. Such efforts are made by farmers up and down the country to enforce the Keep Out so beloved of Britain’s rural landowners. Anyone who’s tried to ramble has come across similar, from piles of rubbish concealing footpath signs all the way to threats and electrified fences. It is these people alongside profit-only corporations, sometimes represented by the suits of the Country Land and Business Association, who are whinging about the removal of a 2031 deadline to register historic rights of way.  And their anger at the loss of this deadline is why the idea of a permanent registry itself should die entirely, replaced by a proper right to roam.  Nick Hayes does a far better job than I could of talking through both the everyday realities and the national statistics of land hoarding in his Book of Trespass, but what crops up most is this: 92% of land in England is inaccessible to the rest of us. It’s a powerful statistic, but the implications go far wider.  You don’t need much imagination, perhaps only the example of water companies, to come up with scenarios in which Big Agribusiness might abuse the privacy afforded by control of endless acres of land which nobody is allowed to walk on. Satellite studies may be able to tell us in broad strokes that the UK’s soil is steadily becoming poisoned by excess levels of nitrates, phosphorous and acidification, while biosphere health is declining with loss of insect and birdlife particularly notable. But that doesn’t give us a good idea of what’s actually happening. The NBN Atlas of biodiversity offers a great example of this. If you zoom in on its maps of where studies are taking place, the vast majority are simply the 8% where we can get at. The only people with reliable access to the rest are government officials, a grouping that can never be well-staffed or incorruptible enough to watch over all the fields of England. Mass public participation would really be the only way to achieve such coverage. It’s thus an obscene gift to the greediest landowners in our society to offer them a permanent, uncontestable right to tell the rest of us to Keep Out unless the track we’re walking happens to be on officials’ maps. It offers us a bare minimum protection for travel across 8% of “our country” while encouraging an aggressive elimination of any other option in the name of the law. Those who hide behind wildflower patches are aching for the deadline to pass, to be able to finally, categorically say “it’s not on the list” and put down any argument to the contrary. It doesn’t just get rid of an annoyance, it’s a shield for whatever they see fit to do when exploiting the land.  This whole argument isn’t really about clarity of rules, it’s about control and exclusion. Not just by the unfriendly tweeds of today, but by those of every generation ahead, as agribusiness continues its long march to monopoly.  We cannot rely on a combination of legally-protected routes covering a bare fraction of the countryside and the changeable whims of lords, little and large, who have been given impunity to exclude. Even Labour knows this to be true, and not so long ago had taken on board calls to bring right to roam into law. Yet in 2023 they abruptly ditched pledges to fix the situation, part of an asinine attempt to attract support from disaffected Tories, which lost them 500,000 votes and left them reliant on Reform for their majority—a campaign which is, currently, going about as well as could be expected with tractors battering down the constituency doors of Labour MPs. ENDLESS REASONS TO RE-CONNECT TOWN AND COUNTRY Those technocratic geniuses in Westminster have managed to simultaneously abandon basic moral imperatives while getting not a bean in return. It’s an utterly predictable outcome, and you have to wonder how much longer they’re going to delude themselves that their mix of clueless economic tinkering and cackhanded sops to right-wing sentiment will ever make them popular in British farmyards. But there is an argument for right to roam that can be made to farmers, even if Labour is too thick to make it.  The root cause of much of the sector’s discomfort is alienation. Of production from retail, of countryside from town. Those villagers who sneer at townies? Of course they do, working class urbanites are often as foreign to them as the dinghies that land in Kent. A thing to be feared, people who litter and talk loudly and don’t follow the ways. Then on the other hand why would townies, whose closest natural experience is neighbourhood foxes rooting through their bins, care about farmers’ problems? And as a result, why would Westminster?  If farmers want city folk to start caring about where their food comes from, these lessons can’t just be offered through the pages of the Times and the Telegraph. You can get a certain distance by plonking petrolheads in front of a telly to watch Jeremy Clarkson fool around getting oversized machinery stuck, but what’s missing is physical connection. We’re currently watching half the country’s gardens get ripped out and tiled over in the latest fashion trend because so many people have no idea how to tend them, take no joy in watching things grow; reversing this lost love should be a priority.- Empathy and support comes from familiarity. Bringing the public into the countryside may benefit us, but it also benefits those farmers who want more engagement, who need a more direct way to shift their produce than begging another skimpy cheque from the Tesco brass. There’s endless reasons to re-connect town and country that should appeal to everyone: fewer miles from field to plate, bypassing of middlemen, health, happiness, and greater mutual understanding. Any campaign to improve the small farmer’s lot starts with ditching the priorities of big firms and getting the public—those Labour can’t do without—on board. And as a bonus, we all know what will happen when the public has fuller access to the fields of the big firms. All that unsustainable destruction can finally be exposed, the lie of stewardship laid bare, and pressure applied.  Walkers like my dad who plod the rural routes today are a pale shadow of the masses who used to watch and participate in the agricultural cultures of our countryside. They are funnelled down carefully-controlled paths, or generously allowed to access a handful of routes at the behest of old manor houses. They often play at “revival” with theme-park renditions of old traditions, and have books talking about what used to be, but the reality across most of the country is empty fields and a heavy silence, with no-one to watch.  The true beneficiaries of this system are those who abuse it, while the rest of us have not even seen what we’ve lost. Farmers who genuinely care about the land shouldn’t fear right to roam, and Labour would lose little from re-embracing it. The post A little lane, and hedges leafing appeared first on Freedom News.

FARMERS’ PROTESTS OVER A VELVETY SOFT REDUCTION OF INHERITANCE TAX PRIVILEGES MAY SEEM OVERBLOWN, BUT THERE’S A KERNEL OF SOMETHING INTERESTING THERE ~ Rob Ray ~ With tractors besieging Downing Street, the new and shiny … well new, anyway, protest scene of the month has been farmers, tromping about in their wellies telling off Labour for taxing them into oblivion. Some of their case is, inevitably given their previously favoured status, finding little sympathy from the left, especially watching the likes of Priti Patel chummy up with people causing the sort of roads disruption she (and the right generally) despised when the Tories were in power. There is a sense of immense entitlement in the statement “my farm is worth £1.5 million but”, especially when, as long as you know how to follow the system, the tax itself doesn’t kick in until £2.65m, affecting just 117 farms a year — a tiny percentage of Britain’s more than 200,000. There is a certain appeal to the heartstrings when people talk about having their lives and cultures uprooted, especially as “custodians of the land”. The problem with this romantic argument, as any countrysider will know, is that it’s frequently bollocks. As owners of the land farmers are, all too often, less custodians than hoarders and exploiters, raging against any interference or outside enjoyment of Their Property. They’re as likely to try and seal off public access as make any effort to enable public enjoyment — there’s a reason 92% of the English countryside is barred to the rest of us. And notwithstanding some honourable exceptions, their collective treatment of the land is hardly exemplary, as environmental journalist George Monbiot has exhaustively documented over many years. This is not a grouping that has done much to justify its self-portrayal, let alone encourage other communities’ support.  Multi-generational though some (not as many as is often portrayed) may be, the small number of highly successful farmers who might actually be caught in the tax net are also not the reincarnation of Pop and Ma Larkin, they’re running highly mechanised businesses for profit. In fact of those protesting, it was more likely to be the kids of a wealthy businessman or celebrity abusing the previous total lack of taxation on farm inheritance who were facing a bit of a knock to their future assets. Expat James Dyson’s 36,000 acres or Jeremy Clarkson’s £12m farm for example (Nigel Farage’s £3m in holdings is not farmland but no doubt he’d define it as such in a heartbeat given half a chance). But that’s not the whole story. If it were, the crowds wouldn’t have turned out. The protests are, in reality, about more than just this particular tax which in the cold light is not that scary for small scale farmers — but they are absolutely primed to be suspicious, and to join whatever protest is likely to highlight their grievances. It was not uncommon, for example, to hear a farmer being interviewed say something like “my land is worth a million but my profit is £20,000.” For anyone who’s been paying attention, this is not a new complaint. Many of them really are on wafer-thin margins. A single bad year can put everything at risk, and many children of farmers work normal jobs because the farm itself can’t sustain their labour. So the protests are more amalgamations of views on everything from regulatory interference to loss of targeted financial support, which has simply been hung on a cause that cropped up and was getting the media attention (and also catalysed by the fact Labour is doing it, given they are generally a knee-jerk Tory cohort). The irony is, however, that they are about less than they should be. Because what they should be fighting is neoliberalism under both Labour and Tories (and Reform, if it ever gains power). This has been part of a process of (forgive me) de-bourgeoisification that has been going on quietly for some time, with old families watching their previously powerful capital positions being eroded generation by generation. They are undercut by bigger producers and squeezed by retail middlemen until they find themselves sitting on land that is only really profitable if it’s sold, often doing most of the work themselves (the average farm employs just two people per holding).  It’s hard to feel too sorry for the great great grandkids of the people who enforced enclosure of the commons when they complain about being subjected to this ever so stressful process of being turfed off “their” land (with compensation) by bigger bastards. But the fact is their distress does not benefit us. It simply transfers control over the means of production from a mass of small fry to a few big fish, be they energy firms looking for somewhere to plonk wind turbines, asset management firms looking to park some money or giant agribusinesses dividing up the industry amongst themselves.  This is not lefties expropriating their hard-earned for the greater good, it’s a standard process of globalised capitalism that all major political parties are supportive of (or if they aren’t, face relentless disciplinary action until they become so). So what would be a pragmatic course? Well one effort was being made, funnily enough, by members of Just Stop Oil. Writing in their newsletter earlier this week, they noted: “We decided to join the farmer’s protest in Whitehall on Tuesday to try to open a dialogue with our farmers. Real farmers, and farm workers, not those investors who have jumped on a tax loophole and are now upset that it’s being taken away. “We need farmers to grow our food at a price people can afford — in this and every country. But we also need them to help with nature restoration, managing water quality and looking after our natural carbon sinks, all while being ripped off by the major supermarkets and undercut by cheap imports. It’s a lot to ask for, and many farmers are upset, not by the changes to inheritance tax, but by the reduction of government support payments to help them transition towards more sustainable agriculture. “On top of that, this year, as a result of the extreme rainfall, farmers had the worst harvest since World War II and conditions are only going to get more difficult. This is the underlying issue that we wanted to highlight — food security. In this country it’s probably the most pressing and immediate climate threat to large numbers of people, and as we know, that is not being made clear in the media. “It was uncomfortable being there, knowing you’re in the company of Priti Patel and Reform, but we should not just cede the ground to the far-right. It’s important that people are present at these events, connecting these issues to the bigger picture.” I have my disagreements with JSO, but I applaud both the sentiment and their earnest effort here, which frankly is very geneous given how their own disruptive actions have been treated — a degree of bitterness about the blatant hypocrisy of the political response to these go slows compared to theirs might be understandable. The small farmers of 2024 are not natural allies of the left and certainly not of the anarchists. They have a lot of straight up reactionary nonsense embedded in their subcultures. But we may have more potential strength than we think in getting through to them. Labour and Tory have both let them down, and Farage did them no favours with Brexit. And actually there is a quiet co-operative and self-sufficiency movement in this country which has far more depth and pull than the primarily urban protest scene pays attention to. Many farmers don’t like us, or trust our methods. It would take a step change in thinking to draw them towards a viewpoint that re-emphasises collectivity, an abandonment of the traditionalist hierarchy that has defined their lives and encouragement of direct working class re-engagement with the land. But it’s not impossible, as has been shown in fits and starts in all sorts of campaigns. Fealty to crown and country is dependent on a compact that has, manifestly, been broken for some time. And what good, after all, is there in trying to maintain a lonely, jealous, futile grip on your small slice of individual capital when you are at the mercy of greater demons? Loyal rebels and Tories they may be today, but in terms of their material conditions, we could have something to say to the petit bourgeois of the fields.  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Pic: Tractor by Rab Lawrence/CC The post Return the common to the goose appeared first on Freedom News.

ITEMS DISCUSSED IN THIS PROGRAM: UK FARMING PROTESTS • TRUMP’S DOMESTIC AND WORLD POLITICS • INDIGENOUS PEOPLES’ ANTI-COP The post Freedom News Review – November 19 appeared first on Freedom News.